Richard Roundtree Biography

Fast Facts

• Joined the Negro Ensemble Company Acting Workshop in 1967
• Played private detective John Shaft in Shaft (1971), Shaft's Big Score (1972) and Shaft in Africa (1973), and in the TV crime drama Shaft (1973-74)
• Sidney Poitier wanted the lead role in Shaft, but wouldn't screen-test for it, so director Gordon Parks selected Roundtree as his star
• Provided the voice of the title character in the video game Akuji the Heartless
• In 1993, was diagnosed with a rare form of breast cancer that required a double mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiation treatments
• His father, a Pentecostal minister, would not go to see his films until the son talked him into viewing 1996's Once Upon a Time
• When We Were Colored
• While trying to keep his cancer a secret during filming of a 1998 episode of Dr
• Quinn, Medicine Woman, he convinced producers to let him wear a T-shirt in a scene as a topless bare-knuckle fighter, because otherwise it would expose the long surgical scar across his chest
• Is a spokesman for the Susan G
• Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and a men's health-care initiative called Know Your Score