Calvin Lockhart

Calvin Lockhart was a film, television, and stage actor from the Bahamas. After briefly studying engineering at New York's Cooper Union, he dropped out to pursue acting. He eventually made his way to Broadway, and then headed off to Europe because of greater acting opportunities for black actors. He soon made his film debut as the star of the 1961 Italian comedy "Venere creola." Lockhart eventually settled in England and made several films there throughout the decade, with 1968 being an especially busy year--he found roles in the dramatic thriller "A Dandy in Aspic," starring Mia Farrow, and the musical comedy "Joanna," which featured an inter-racial romance. The '70s became even busier for Lockhart, beginning with starring roles in the inner-city drama "Halls of Anger," followed by the Ossie Davis-directed cop action-comedy "Cotton Comes to Harlem," both in 1970. As the decade progressed, Lockhart went deeper into the blaxploitation genre, particularly in two films directed by Sidney Poitier--with whom Lockhart shared a similar suavely handsome profile; these films were the crime comedy "Uptown Saturday Night" (which featured an all-star cast with no less than Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, and Harry Belafonte) and "Let's Do it Again," which featured Cosby, along with Jimmie Walker and Poitier himself. Lockhart's later work included more mainstream fare, from an eight-episode run on the primetime soap "Dynasty" to his appearance as Colonel Izzi in Eddie Murphy's 1988 Africans-in-New York comedy, "Coming to America." Lockhart passed away from a stroke at the age of 72