Louis Gossett Jr. and the Fine Art of Stealing the Show. Sir, Yes Sir!
Bill Gallo, the late sports cartoonist for the New York Daily News, told a story about his World War II experience in the Marine Corps that was less chilling in the recounting than it must have been at the time.
On the first day of training, he said, his Drill Instructor (DI) began by saying, “There are 20 of you here. You will all be sent to fight the Japanese in the South Pacific. Nineteen of you will be killed. The one who survives will be the one who pays the closest attention to this training.”
It was, Gallo reflected, a good way to ensure everyone’s attention.
Louis Gossett Jr. took much the same approach, albeit with lower real-life stakes, for his role in the 1982 movie An Officer and A Gentleman.
The wildly popular An Officer and a Gentleman became a romantic touchstone for Richard Gere and Debra Winger, its two stars.
But 40 years later, the first memory for many people who know the movie isn’t Gere or Winger. It’s Gossett, who played DI Sgt. Emil Foley.
Foley’s job is to take Gere’s Zack Mayo, a kid with attitude and authority issues, and turn him into a military officer, perhaps the most disciplined gig this side of defusing land mines.
Gossett plays Foley as the ultimate DI. While he’s more human and nuanced than Jack Webb’s Jim Moore in the 1957 film The DI, in several ways that makes him more imposing — even beyond the fact Foley is better written and acted.
If Gossett didn’t steal the show in An Officer and a Gentleman, he made off with a good chunk of it. When he died Friday at the age of 87, Sgt. Emil Foley was the lead memory in obituaries that were stuffed with first-class performances, from George Murchinson in Broadway’s Raisin in the Sun to Fiddler in the original Roots to several hundred roles on TV and in the movies. He played Anwar Sadat and Satchel Paige, Brigadier General Charles Sinclair in Iron Eagle and Billy Flynn in Chicago.
Emil Foley won him an Oscar as best supporting actor, the first black performer to secure that statuette. In keeping, perhaps, most of his roles over the years were either as a guest star or supporting actor, which correctly suggests he was an outstanding character actor. That’s a much more impressive achievement than its reputation might suggest, if only because it gives a performer the role flexibility Gossett fully exercised over seven decades.
It also enables a performer to sneak up on a movie. Most viewers went to An Officer and a Gentleman to see Gere and Winger, and many of them walked out saying, man, how about that DI.
In early 1983, on the eve of the Oscar ceremony where Gossett would win his groundbreaking award, he sat down to say yes, he was already proud of how it had turned out.
He liked the role from the first time he read the script, he said. He also said he didn’t read it as a white role, though it was written with the presumption of a white actor.
“The problem,” he said, adding this was one of many problems with how the movie biz treated black actors, “is that as soon as a black actor is cast, it becomes a ‘black role.’ This wasn’t. It wasn’t black or white.”
Officer and a Gentleman director Taylor Hackford, told the New York Times that casting Gossett did break some unintended racial ground. It might have been the first time in the movies, Hackford said, where a black man held absolute power over a bunch of white kids.
Gossett didn’t disagree with that. But what appealed to him about the DI persona, he said, was more universal: It requires a person to care deeply about the people he is training and in the course of that training never show it.
“You develop 99% humanity,” he said, “and then you suppress it.”
To maximize the impact of that disconnect during filming, Gossett said, he adopted the DI persona 24/7.
“I wouldn’t talk to the other actors,” he said. “I stayed in a separate place. I’d get up at 4:30 a.m. and run. The others all thought I was a little crazy. Word got out on set, ‘Watch out for Lou Gossett.’
“It was rough. They had some very good parties I couldn’t attend.”
As for the character himself, Gossett drew on a real-life role model.
“I remembered my DI from parachute-jumping school at Fort Benning in 1961,” he said. “We called him Dracula. I’ll bet if he sees this movie he’ll be seeking me out.”
Jack Webb, Gossett said charitably, “did a good job with the [DI] role. But there’s more humanity to it than that.”
Gossett also noted that An Officer and a Gentleman is set in a time when the U.S. isn’t involved in any major wars. “A DI becomes more important in wartime,” he said. “DIs take casualties personally. That’s why training is so difficult — the harder it is, the more they save.”
Just playing a character that intense in a movie role, Gossett said, made him feel the need to decompress.
“It’s been a long siege,” he said. “Five or six days of doing publicity, then I will disappear under water. There are no phones under water. I’ve done diving all over the world and I’d like to try the South Pacific. I’d like to fish there, too.”
Everything didn’t go swimmingly for Louis Gossett Jr. He had battles with alcohol and drugs. He didn’t see the entertainment world move as close as he would have liked to colorblind casting. His star turn in a TV series, Gideon Oliver, only lasted five episodes. Three marriages didn’t work out, and he never did get back to “the boards,” the Broadway theater roles that were his own acting roots and to which he said in 1983 he was “dying” to return.
But by the time the curtain fell, he had done more than all right. In a game where at least 19 of 20 careers never happen, he scored one that did.
