Celebrity Biographies
Yaphet Kotto
Although he has a fairly extensive filmography, he will remain in the collective imagination as Kananga, the James Bond villain, but also as one of the protagonists of “Alien, the eighth passenger.” Yaphet Kotto passed away in the Philippines on March 14, 2021, at the age of 81, as announced by Tessi Sinahon, his wife, on his Facebook account. “You played the villain in some of your movies, but you are a true hero to me and to many people too. A good man, a good father, a good husband and a decent human being, very rare to find,” he wrote.
Born on November 15, 1939 in New York, Yaphet Frederick Kotto was the son of a Jewish Cameroonian businessman who had emigrated to the United States, and an army nurse. He began studying drama at the age of 16 at Actors Mobile Theater Studio, making his debut at 17 in a production of “Othello” by William Shakespeare . In his early years, he turned down several film offers, preferring to act in plays. He was reluctant to appear in movies, because he only seemed interested in the Broadway stage, until at 23 he appeared as an extra, in Four Guys from Texas .
He claimed to have witnessed alien visits. “It started when I was 9 or 10 years old. I remember one day they told me I couldn’t go outside, so I stayed looking through the window at some boys playing basketball in the streets of the Bronx,” he recalled in an interview. “When I turned around, a figure was behind me, it was at least five or six feet with an elongated head. It then disappeared.” Another day they told him to go outside because something strange was happening. “I went outside and when I got there I saw a huge circle of smoke as big as Yankee Stadium. Everybody was terrified. Two or three nights later I saw it again. That thing had blotted out the whole sky, the moon, everything. It was huge.”
Yaphet Kotto played supporting roles in titles such as The Thomas Crown Affair . In 1967 he tried his luck in the field of music, publishing the single, “Have You Ever Seen The Blues”, which, however, did not achieve the expected success. He played his most remembered role in Live and Let Die , Roger Moore ‘s first filmas 007, where he was Kananga, a businessman nicknamed Mr. Big who used voodoo for his purposes. He will also remain in the collective imagination as the engineer Dennis Parker, in Alien, the eighth passenger, one of the emblematic films of cinematographic science fiction. He claims that he did not accept the role because of his encounters with aliens. “It had nothing to do with it. It was the incredible 72-page script that made me decide.” Despite everything, during filming in the Philippines he had a paranormal experience with visitors from other planets, because according to him he observed a circle of what seemed to be smoke, which made him lose consciousness of time: “Where was I during the hours that I saw that thing? Had I been abducted? Because I have huge gaps in some of those moments.”
Divorced from Rita Ingrid Dittman, with whom he had three children, Yaphet Kotto joined Antoinette Pettyjohn, with whom he had two more, and finally the aforementioned Tessie Sinahon. He earned an Emmy nomination for playing Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in the TV movie Raid on Entebbe . In 1980, he played convict Richard ‘Dickie’ Coombes in Brubaker . Since then, Yaphet Kotto has taken on all kinds of roles, as he fought against Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1987 dystopian thriller Chased , appears in the popular series The A-Team , as a villain, gave life to the hard-working FBI agent Alonzo Mosely, in the comedy actionEscape at midnight , along with Robert De Niro , and played a doctor in the horror film Final Nightmare: The Death of Freddy . After a brief appearance on The Wire, he retired after the 2004 sitcom Witness Protection .