Richard Roundtree, model and actor who caused a sensation as the private detective John Shaft – obituary

Richard Roundtree, who has died aged 81, was a model-turned-actor who elevated the ability to look good in leather to an art form; known as the first black action hero, Roundtree received a Golden Globe nomination for his depiction of the private detective John Shaft in Gordon Parks’s crime-action blaxploitation thriller Shaft (1971), confidently dodging traffic in Times Square while dressed in an elegant brown leather coat with his collar turned up.

Marketed with the strapline “Shaft’s his name, shaft’s his game”, Shaft was among the earliest films to depict an African-American character in an action role. Roundtree’s Shaft was a cool man with a fashionable apartment, lots of beautiful women and a pearl-handled revolver inside his refrigerator, who is hired by a Harlem crime lord after the racketeer’s daughter is kidnapped by the Mafia.

Shaft proved a hit with American audiences of all colours. It was also popular in Britain, with The Daily Telegraph reporting in 1972 how it had broken house records at the Ritz in Leicester Square, adding: “And in all sorts of places from Brighton to Blackpool its run has been extended.”

Meanwhile, the Theme from Shaft won an Academy Award in 1972 for best original song, making its composer Isaac Hayes the first African-American to win an Oscar in a non-acting category.

The concept was imitated by other blaxploitation filmmakers, typically featuring an aloof black hero, white villains, sex with both black and white women, an emphasis on action and guns, and the problems of low-income African-Americans. “There are very few black people to my knowledge who have been idolised the way John Shaft has,” Roundtree told the New York Times in 1972. “Kids are running around in black leather jackets and are swaggering.”

He went on to appear in two sequels, starting with Shaft’s Big Score (1972). This time his character no longer operated from grotty premises but from a swanky love nest. “Alas, while Shaft may be splendid in bed, wonderful with his fists, not to say his feet, and not too bad with his brain, he’s hopeless with a gun,” observed Patrick Gibbs in The Daily Telegraph.

Shaft in Africa (1973), in which Roundtree’s character infiltrates an East African slavery ring luring young Africans to Europe with the promise of non-existent lucrative jobs, was among the first American films to be shot in Ethiopia. During his time there the actor had an audience with Emperor Haile Selassie, retaining his cool as the emperor’s pet cheetah strolled by.

The success of the Shaft trilogy led to his appearance in the short-lived CBS television series Shaft (1973-74), though the action was modified for television, leaving the star to describe it as “a lifeless, watered-down version of the films”. Many years later the concept was revived in two more films, both called Shaft and released in 2000 and 2019 respectively starring Samuel L Jackson as his character’s nephew, with Roundtree in cameo roles.

Elsewhere, he played the motorcycle daredevil Miles with Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner in the disaster movie Earthquake (1974); appeared opposite Peter O’Toole in Man Friday (1975), an amusing if uneven reworking of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in which the Friday and Crusoe roles are reversed; he was the army sergeant Augustus Henderson in the box-office flop Inchon (1981), a Korean War epic starring Laurence Olivier and Jacqueline Bisset; and took on the role of private investigator Diehl Swift in the 1930s period comedy City Heat (1984) with Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds.

Roundtree recalled how Shaft had an impact on the lives of countless black Americans, something they were never slow to share with him. As a result he was typecast for many years and forced to establish a different side to his acting: in the Fox TV sitcom Roc (1991) when he was in one the first interracial gay couples to be married on television. He recalled, however, his father visiting him in Los Angeles and listening to his complaints. “Son, let me tell you something,” the older man said. “A lot of people leave this earth not being known for anything. Shut up.”

Richard Arnold Roundtree was born in New Rochelle, in New York state, on July 9 1942, the son of John Roundtree, a refuse collector, caterer and Pentecostal Church elder, and his wife Kathryn (née Watkins), a housekeeper for a white family.

He played American football at the then predominantly Jewish New Rochelle High School, where he was voted the most popular, best-dressed and best-looking senior. Awarded an athletics scholarship to Southern Illinois University, he dropped out in 1963, explaining that he was no longer able to cope with the overt racism.

Back in New York he became a salesman at Barney’s department store and began to model the clothes he was selling. He was taken on by Mr Carter, the African-American male etiquette and modelling school opened by Ophelia DeVore and her husband Harold Carter. Meanwhile, Eunice Johnson of Ebony magazine hired him to model at the Ebony Fashion Fair, playing 79 cities in 90 days. Soon he was appearing in adverts for Duke hair grease and Salem cigarettes.

Roundtree joined the Negro Ensemble Company in New York in 1967, playing the boxing legend Jack Johnson in the company’s production of Howard Sackler’s The Great White Hope. Three years later he made his big-screen debut in the semi-pornographic Candid Camera-style film What Do You Say to a Naked Lady? (1970), his only movie experience before Shaft. In 1972 he received a Golden Globe award as most promising newcomer.

His other films did not have the same impact as Shaft. As a rookie firefighter in Firehouse (1972) he faced racism in a small-town fire department; in the heist movie Diamonds (1975) he helped Robert Shaw’s British aristocrat to breach a supposedly impregnable vault in Tel Aviv; and in the Tarzan spoof George of the Jungle (1997) he was the kindly Kwame guiding Leslie Mann’s Ursula on her visit to Africa.

On television he played the raffish slave Sam Bennett in Roots (1977), the brilliant Dr Daniel Reubens in Generations (1989-91) and the amoral private detective Mr Shaw in Desperate Housewives (2004-05).

Roundtree married Mary Jane Grant in 1963. That was dissolved, and in 1980 he married Karen Ciernia. That too was dissolved, and he is survived by two children from his first marriage and three from his second. In 1993 he was diagnosed with a rare form of male breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy.

He recalled how his eldest daughter’s most embarrassing moment in high school was when another pupil said he had seen her father naked in a film. As he told The Philadelphia Inquirer: “You don’t think about those things when you’re young.”

Richard Roundtree, born July 9 1942, died October 24 2023