John Amos, best known for the 1970’s sitcom “Good Times” and the miniseries “Roots” during the same decade, has died at 84, his publicist finally confirmed.
Why it is being announced more than a month after it happened due to natural causes on Aug. 21 in Los Angeles was not immediately clear. He had gotten in a dispute with his daughter over claims of elder abuse and a GoFundMe page back in June 2023, right around the same time Amos was hospitalized due to fluid filling his lower body and causing issues with his heart. A representative for Amos later said the doctors drained all of the fluid and that he was getting better.
Amos was widely heralded for his role as James Evans Sr., the patriarch of a struggling but proud family living in the Chicago projects in “Good Times,” which aired on CBS from 1974 to 1979.
“That show was the closest depiction in reality to life as an African American family living in those circumstances as it could be,” Amos told Time magazine in 2021.
But that also brought about creative differences — among them, Amos objecting to Jimmie Walker’s leading role as J.J. — and Amos was written out of the show in 1976.
Until then, Amos — along with Esther Rolle as his screen wife, Florida — was a prominent part of one of television’s first Black two-parent families. Because African Americans were so rarely portrayed back then, Amos was a stickler that it be realistic without the buffoonery that many felt J.J. personified. That Norman Lear, a White man, produced the show probably exacerbated the tensions, and eventually, Amos’ character was killed off in a car accident.
“Many fans consider him their TV father,” his son, Kelly Christopher “K.C.” Amos, said in a statement. “He lived a good life. His legacy will live on in his outstanding works in television and film as an actor. My father loved working as an actor throughout his entire life. He was my dad, my best friend, and my hero.”
Amos, who first appeared on America’s TV screens as the weatherman Gordy on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” from 1970 to 1973, bounced back from his “Good Times” dismissal as the adult version of the best-remembered character Kunta Kinte from Alex Haley’s miniseries “Roots” in 1977.
He earned one of the miniseries’ 37 Emmy nominations.
“It was a life-changing role for me, as an actor and just from a humanistic standpoint,” he told Time magazine. “It was the culmination of all of the misconceptions and stereotypical roles that I had lived and seen being offered to me. It was like a reward for having suffered those indignities.”
Amos played other roles with gravitas, among them a recurring role as the Adm. Percy Fitzwallace on “The West Wing.”
Amos, born John Allen Amos Jr. on Dec. 27, 1939, in Newark, N.J., had a short-lived career as a pro football player before he discovered his penchant for acting. He also made TV appearances on “Hunter,” “The District,” “Men in Trees,” “All About the Andersons,” “Two and a Half Men,” and “The Ranch.”
He made movie appearances, perhaps most notably as the gangster Kansas City Mack alongside Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby in Let’s Do It Again (1975).
Amos, who was married and divorced twice, is survived by K.C. and his daughter Shannon.
