John Amos, the TV writer turned Emmy-nominated actor who played Good Times’ stoic father before being fired from the period sitcom for objecting to stereotypes and letting his temper get the better of him, has died . He was 84. Amos died of natural causes on August 21 in Los Angeles, his son, KC Amos, announced. “It is with sincere sadness that I share with you the passing of my father,” he said in a statement. “He was a man with the kindest heart and a heart of gold… and he was loved all over the world. Many fans consider him their TV dad. He lived a good life. His legacy will live on through his outstanding works on television and film as an actor.” Amos, who played football at Colorado State University and had training camps with the Denver Broncos and Kansas City Chiefs of the American Football League, saw his showbiz career take off after landing a gig to play WJN-TV weatherman Gordy Howard in The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The New Jersey native received his Emmy nomination for playing Toby, the older version of Kunta Kinte, in the critically acclaimed 1977 ABC miniseries Roots, and he had a recurring role as Admiral Percy Fitzwallace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on NBC’s West Wing. . His big-screen career started with Melvin Van Peebles’ blaxploitation classic Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), and he played the manager of a McDonald’s-style restaurant that hires an African prince (Eddie Murphy) and his right-hand man (Arsenio). Hall) in Coming to America (1988). Many years earlier, Amos had completed McDonald’s training program before appearing as an employee for the fast-food chain in a well-known 1971 commercial (“Grab a bucket and mop, scrub the bottom and the top!”), which he credited with helping his children get to leave university. After appearing a dozen times as the good-natured Gordy on the first four seasons of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the buxom Amos was invited to read in the role of James Evans Sr., husband of Esther Rolle’s Florida Evans and father of their three children, in a new CBS series, Good Times. The 1974-79 show, created by Eric Monte and Mike Evans and developed by Norman Lear, was set in a downtown Chicago apartment located in the projects (think Cabrini-Green). Good Times, a spin-off of Maude (itself a descendant of All in the Family), was the first sitcom to center on an African-American family. “Everyone knew who Norman Lear was,” Amos said in a 2014 interview for the Televison Academy Foundation. “I had seen the pilot episode of All in the Family and thought, ‘There’s no way they’re going to put that on TV.’ … And sure enough, it became a hit. “So I went in and read with Miss Rolle for Norman Lear, the three of us in his office. When we finished reading, Norman looked at Esther, and Esther looked at me and looked at Norman and said, ‘He’s doing great.'” Amos was on the show for three seasons, but he quickly disapproved of the foolishness. stereotypical storylines surrounding their eldest son on the series, JJ – played by comedian Jimmie Walker – and he made his criticism public. “We had some disagreements,” he said. “I felt like there was too much emphasis on JJ with his chicken hat saying, ‘Dy-no-mite!’ every third page. I felt that just as much emphasis and mileage could have been gotten out of my other two children, one of whom aspired to be a Supreme Court Justice, played by Ralph Carter, and the other, BernNadette Stanis, who aspired to be a surgeon . “But I wasn’t the most diplomatic guy at the time, and (the show’s producers) were tired of their lives being threatened over jokes. So they said, ‘You know, why don’t we kill him? We can get on with our lives!’ That taught me a lesson: I wasn’t as important as I thought I was to the show or to Norman Lear’s plans. James Evans Sr. was the victim of a car accident in a two-part episode that aired in September 1976 to kick off season four.

John Alan Amos Jr. was born on December 27, 1939 in Newark, New Jersey. His father drove a tractor-trailer and worked as a mechanic, and his mother, Annabelle, was a housekeeper who eventually went back to school and became a nutritionist. His mother cleaned the house for a cartoonist who drew the Archie comics, and that led to Amos and a friend attending a taping of the radio show The Archie Show at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. “It blew my imagination wide open,” he said. “In a way I was disappointed because none of them looked like Archie, Jughead or Veronica… Some of the magic disappeared, but the science of the industry became clear to me.” At East Orange High School, Amos drew cartoons and wrote columns for the school newspaper, played a convict in a production of The Man Who Came to Dinner and was a running back star. Amos won football scholarships to Long Beach City College in California and then to Colorado State University, where the Rams had the longest losing streak in the country at the time. “God kept telling me, ‘I don’t want you to play football,’” he said. “The direction I got from above was to become an artist, to become a writer, something that I had always done and that was easy for me.” Still, Amos didn’t give up on his dream of playing professional football and signed his first free-agent contract with the Broncos. (One of his teammates in training camp was Ernie Barnes, whose painting, Sugar Shack, appeared in the end credits of Good Times.) Amos played or attempted to play with many teams, including the Norfolk Neptunes of the Continental Football League and British Columbia Lions of the Canadian Football League. After the Chiefs cut him for the second time, coach Hank Stram had him read a poem about shattered dreams to the players — and he got a standing ovation. “It was the first confirmation I got from my colleagues that I could write material that could evoke emotions in people,” he said. “It was very satisfying, much more than running away from the tackle or trying to pick up a blitz.” (Amos would play a retired player struggling with injuries from his NFL days in the HBO series Ballers.) In Vancouver, Amos did stand-up and met a television writer who encouraged him to come to Los Angeles, where he wrote a – and performance country. job on a syndicated TV variety show hosted by radio personalities Al Lohman and Roger Barkley. (Also working on that program: McLean Stevenson, Craig T. Nelson and Barry Levinson.) That in turn led to writing and performing in sketches for the 1969 CBS variety program The Leslie Uggams Show. Two producers there, Lorenzo Music and Dave Davis, helped develop a series for Mary Tyler Moore and thought he would be great for it. “They could very easily have said, ‘Well, (Gordy) can be a sports announcer.’ That would have been (as easy as) falling off a log for me,” he recalled. “I liked that he was a meteorologist; that implied that the man could think.’ In the 1973-74 season of Maude, Amos appeared in three episodes as Florida’s husband, kicking off the launch of Good Times. James Evans struggled to find full-time work, but “he provided his family with any job he could find. We managed to survive, and America loved that show. It was close to how most Americans lived at that time.” In his 2014 interview with the TV Academy Foundation, Amos became emotional when he noted that “young men, in their thirties and forties, of every ethnicity imaginable came up to me and said, ‘You are the father I never had.’ After leaving Good Times, Lear’s company hired him to play a congressman in the pilot for a new show called Onward and Upward. But he would also abandon that project. Amos had traveled to Africa several times, living in Liberia for months “to absorb the culture of the continent from which I indirectly came,” when he was approached to appear in Roots. “It was exactly what I needed,” he said. “It took the bad taste of Good Times out of my mouth – not that Good Times had all been bad, but the circumstances under which I left and the bitterness between Norman Lear and myself… I realize that I have a lot of it to myself. I wasn’t the easiest guy in the world to be around or to direct. I challenged everyone. (Roots) was a vindication, a huge sense of satisfaction.” He and Lear eventually got over it, and Amos starred for the producer in a short-lived 1994 sitcom, 704 Hauser, about a liberal family living in Archie Bunker’s former home in Queens. Amos also had recurring roles on other TV shows such as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, playing Will Smith’s stepfather; Hunter; The district; Men in trees; All About the Andersons, as Anthony Anderson’s father; and the Netflix drama The Ranch. His film resume also included The World’s Greatest Athlete (1973), Let’s Do It Again (1975), The Beastmaster (1982), Die Hard 2 (1990), Ricochet (1991), Mac (1992), Night Trap (1993), In Good and Bad Times (1995), The Players Club (1998), Coming to America 2 (2021) and Because of Charley (2021). In 1972, he appeared on Broadway in Tough to Get Help, directed by Carl Reiner. Finding it difficult to get work in the 1990s, Amos wrote and starred in the one-man play Halley’s Comet, about an 87-year-old man who ponders the state of the world while waiting in the woods for the events to come. of ‘the comet’. He toured the play for more than twenty years throughout the US and in various overseas cities. More recently, he and his son produced the documentary America’s Dad. In addition to KC (nicknamed after Amos’ days with the Chiefs), survivors include his daughter Shannon, both from his first marriage to Noel ‘Noni’ Mickelson. THR’s Gary Baum wrote about his children’s bitter relationship in November. Amos was also briefly married to actress Lillian Lehman, who played Andre Braugher’s mother in Men of a Certain Age. Duane Byrge contributed to this report.