Roundtree, one of the first black action actors on the silver screen, has died at the age of 81 from complications of pancreatic cancer.
The action movie Shaft didn’t just make Roundtree famous. The eponymous title song by Isaac Hayes won the 1973 Academy Award for best song.
Already Shaft Roundtree was part of the star cast of the disaster film with Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner Earthquake (1974). He also starred alongside Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds City Heat (1984). One of his last major film roles was as a prosecutor in the thriller Se7en (1995) also stars Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman.
Roundtree also made forays into television. He appeared in sixty episodes of the soap opera Generations (1990) and played a private detective in five episodes of Desperate Housewives (2004).
Samuel L. Jackson, his colleague from the Shaftsequels, is broken with grief. The actor writes down Instagram that Roundtree leaves “a big void”.
Roundtree starred in the belated 2000 and 2019 sequels, in which Jackson plays his cousin and the new Shaft. According to the actor, the character will always be the “creation” of his predecessor. “Love you, brother.”
The post first appeared on www.nu.nl