There’s something unusual about the fact that more than a month passed before the death of actor John Amos, 84, was announced on Tuesday. But it takes a while for a powerful personality to come to a complete standstill.

A Golden Gloves champion, a college football player and a minor league football player before crossing over into entertainment – first as a stand-up in Greenwich Village, then as a writer for Leslie Uggams’ 1969 variety show and finally graduating to the big screen – Amos was built to play authority figures (or anti-authority figures). During his long, busy career, he served as minister, inspector, captain, sergeant, doctor, coach, sheriff, preacher, mayor, deacon and, most notably, Admiral Percy Fitzwallace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 22 episodes of ‘ The West Wing,” prestige television before the letter. (When Amos met then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, Powell’s first words to him were, “Percy Fitzwallace? What kind of name is that for a brother?”)

Even “Gordy the Weatherman,” as many of us first knew Amos on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” lived up to expectations. “Gordy was articulate,” Amos recalled in an interview with the Television Academy Foundation. “I liked that he was a meteorologist (rather than a sportscaster) because it implies the man could think, above X’s and O’s.” (In a running joke, he is said to be mistaken for a sportscaster.)

And of course, in the role for which he is perhaps best known, he played a father – not the comedic dork whose children are all smarter than him, but a caring, responsible and strict figure where it mattered. Amos was only 34 when he was cast as James Evans Sr. in the 1974 “Maude” spinoff “Good Times.” Reflecting his innate maturity, he was 19 years younger than Esther Rolle, who played his wife. (He had played a version of the role in a few episodes of “Maude.”)

In keeping with Norman Lear’s house style, loud frantic moments and tantrums were alternated with quiet, reflective, more emotional moments, such as “The Romantic People”, but with comments on class and race. It demonstrated the actor’s range, but Amos began to sour on the show when he felt the focus shift to Jimmie Walker’s low comedic antics as slacker son JJ – “Dyn-o-mite!” you may remember it – and said it too: “I wasn’t the most diplomatic guy at that time,” he said in the same Academy interview. Ultimately, the writers “got tired of having their lives threatened over jokes” and after the third season, Lear let him go. James died off-screen.

Read more: John Amos, star of ‘Good Times,’ ‘Roots’ and ‘Coming to America,’ dies at 84

But “Roots” was right around the corner; like the older version of LeVar Burton’s Kunta Kinte, it was a role for the history books and opened the door to dramatic parts.

Because of the time in which he was born, it fell to Amos to be a pioneer of sorts. He was one of the few black students who integrated his elementary and high school in New Jersey, where he was asked if he had a tail. He married his first wife, Noel J. Mickelson, the mother of his two white children, in 1965, two years before the Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court struck down laws against interracial marriage. And he started out as an actor at a time when substantial roles for black actors were harder to come by, and the idea of ​​color-blind casting was a thing of the distant future.

On stage, meanwhile, he was able to perform the works of Athol Fugard (“‘Master Harold’ … and the Boys” in Detroit), Eugene O’Neill (a tour of “The Emperor Jones” in the role created by Paul Robeson) , August Wilson (“Fences” in Albany) and Shakespeare (Sir Toby Belch in a 1989 production of “Twelfth Night” for Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park, alongside Andre Braugher, LisaGay Hamilton, Michelle Pfeiffer and Gregory Hines). In 1990, he created his own one-man show, “Halley’s Comet,” in which he played a man looking back on the century, and which he toured as recently as 2017.

Between peaks, his career follows the familiar mold of an actor who goes where the work goes, including a reunion with Norman Lear in the short-lived “704 Hauser,” about a black family that moves into Archie Bunker’s old house; a recurring part on the UPN Debbie Allen-LL Cool J sitcom, “In the House” and the CBS crime drama “The District”; and the NBC crime drama “Hunter.” There were a lot of guest recordings from ‘The Love Boat’ and ‘The A-Team’, from ’30 Rock’ and ‘The Righteous Gemstones’. The big screen, among many forgotten films, featured well-remembered turns in Eddie Murphy’s “Coming to America” ​​and an appearance as himself in Josh and Benny Safdie’s “Uncut Gems.”

Television was where he mattered most. Perhaps my favorite Amos role was as bush pilot Buzz Washington in the 2006 Anne Heche comedy “Men in Trees” set in Alaska. Married for ten years to mail-order bride Mai (Lauren Tom), who could be a handful, he emphasized the sweetness that underpinned his best roles; he could be a calming presence on screen. Powerful people don’t have to shout to be heard, and are all the more powerful for that.

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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.