Actor Roscoe Lee Browne dies

Actor Roscoe Lee Browne dies

Roscoe Lee Browne

Actor Roscoe Lee Browne dies

AP

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Actor Roscoe Lee Browne, whose rich voice and dignified bearing brought him an Emmy Award and a Tony nomination, has died. He was 81. Browne died early Wednesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center following a long battle with cancer, said Alan Nierob, a spokesman for the family.

Browne had a decades-long career that ranged from classic theater to TV cartoons. He also was a poet and a former world-class athlete.

His deep, cultured voice was heard narrating the 1995 hit movie Babe. On screen, his character often was smart, cynical and well-educated, whether a congressman, a judge or a butler.

Born May 2, 1925, to a Baptist minister in Woodbury, N.J., Browne graduated from historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he later returned to teach comparative literature and French.

He also was a track star, winning a 1951 world championship in the 800-yard dash.

He was selling wine for an import company when he decided to become a full-time actor in 1956 and had roles that year in the inaugural season of the New York Shakespeare Festival in a production of Julius Caesar.

In 1961, he starred in an English-language version of Jean Genet's play The Blacks. Two years later, he was The Narrator in a Broadway production of The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, a play by Edward Albee from a novella by Carson McCullers. In a front page article on the advances made by blacks in the theater, the New York Times noted that Browne's understudy was white.

He won an Obie Award in 1965 for his role as a rebellious slave in the off-Broadway Benito Cereno.

In movies, he was a spy in the 1969 Alfred Hitchcock feature Topaz and a camp cook in 1972's The Cowboys, which starred John Wayne.

"Some critics complained that I spoke too well to be believable" in the cook's role, Browne told The Washington Post in 1972. "When a critic makes that remark, I think, if I had said, 'Yassuh, boss' to John Wayne, then the critic would have taken a shine to me."

He also said he liked Wayne, "a genuine wit, capable of a splendid bon mot," despite having little use for his conservative politics.

On television, he had several memorable guest roles. He was a snobbish black lawyer trapped in an elevator with bigot Archie Bunker in an episode of the 1970s TV comedy All in the Family and the butler Saunders in the comedy Soap. He won an Emmy in 1986 for a guest role as Professor Foster on The Cosby Show.

In 1992, Browne returned to Broadway in Two Trains Running, one of August Wilson's acclaimed series of plays on the black experience. It won the Tony for best play and brought Browne a Tony nomination for best featured (supporting) actor.

Browne "brings an infectious good humor to the role of Holloway, the resident philosopher who dispenses most of Wilson's common sense," wrote Michael Kuchwara, The Associated Press drama critic.

The New York Times said he portrayed "the wry perspective of one who believes that human folly knows few bounds and certainly no racial bounds. The performance is wise and slyly life-affirming."

Browne also wrote poetry and included some of it along with works by masters such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti and William Butler Yeats in Behind the Broken Words, a poetry anthology stage piece that he and Anthony Zerbe performed annually for three decades.

Browne was the son of Baptist minister Sylvanus Browne and his wife Lovie (born Lovie Lee). Born in Woodbury, New Jersey, Browne first attended historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1946. He undertook postgraduate work at Middlebury College in Vermont, Columbia University in New York City, and at the University of Florence in Italy. Also an outstanding middle distance runner, Browne won the Amateur Athletic Union 1000-yard national indoor championship in 1949. He occasionally returned to Lincoln University between 1946 to 1952 to instruct classes in comparative literature, French, and English. Upon leaving academe he earned a living for several years selling wine for Schenley Import Corporation. Despite his limited amateur acting experience, in 1956 he stunned guests at a party — among them opera singer Leontyne Price — when he announced his intention to quit his secure job with Schenley to become a full-time professional actor.

[edit] Acting career

Despite the apprehensions of his friends, Browne managed to land the roles of soothsayer and Pindarus in Julius Caesar directed by Joseph Papp for New York City’s first Shakespeare Festival Theater. More work with the Shakespeare Festival Theater followed and in 1961 he starred as J. J. Burden in The Connection (1961), his first movie role. Despite lacking the physical attractiveness of a leading man, numerous film roles established his reputation as an exceptionally versatile character actor who was also capable of performing scene-stealing cameos.

Endowed with a resonant, baritone voice and able to project cynicism and a haughty, patrician tone cultivated over the years from reciting lines from Shakespeare, Browne was much in demand for narration and voice-over parts in film and on vinyl albums, audio tapes and CDs he recorded poetry readings, passages from the Bible, and assorted literary works. He returned time and again to the stage to act in Shakespearean plays, and in on- and off-Broadway modern dramas and musical comedies.

With a strong sense of himself, Browne was determined not to accept stereotyped and demeaning roles that had routinely been offered to black actors and he resisted emulating fellow actors. Browne also desired to do more than act and narrate and in 1966 he wrote and made his directorial stage debut with A Hand is On the Gate: An Evening of Negro Poetry and Folk Music starring Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones, Moses Gunn and other rising black talent. A lifelong bachelor who coveted his privacy, in the turbulent decades of the civil rights revolution Browne avoided participation in public protests preferring instead to be “more effective on stage with metaphor…than in the streets with an editorial” (Troupe, 92).

Starting in the late 1960's, Browne increasingly became a guest star on TV on both comedy and dramatic shows like Mannix, All In The Family, Sanford and Son, The Cosby Show and dozens of other shows. He also was a regular on the sitcom Soap where he played Saunders, the erudite butler from 1979 to 1981 replacing Robert Guillaume who went on to his own show Benson. Incidentally, Browne guest starred on Benson with Guillaume. His appearances on The Cosby Show also drew acclaim as well winning an Emmy in 1986 for his guest role as Professor Foster.

[edit] Death

Browne died of cancer in Los Angeles on April 11, 2007[1][2].