John Amos, a Star of ‘Good Times’ and ‘Roots,’ Is Dead at 84

He was the patriarch in one of the first sitcoms with an all-Black cast and an enslaved African as a grown man in the blockbuster TV mini-series.

John Amos, who played a stern patriarch on “Good Times,” America’s first sitcom featuring a two-parent Black family, and who had a starring role in “Roots,” the slavery narrative that became America’s most watched show in the late 1970s, has died in Los Angeles. He was 84.

His publicist, Belinda Foster, confirmed the death on Tuesday, saying he had died on Aug. 21. She did not specify the cause or say why the announcement of his death was delayed.

Mr. Amos’s acting career spanned more than five decades, with his breakthrough coming in 1970 on the CBS comedy “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” playing Gordy, the weatherman on a local television news program working alongside Ms. Moore’s Mary Richards, an associate producer. After three seasons, Mr. Amos left for “Good Times,” a Norman Lear production and a spinoff of the producer’s sitcom “Maude.”

Chronicling the trials and tribulations of a Black working-class family living in the Chicago projects, “Good Times,” which ran from 1974-79, also on CBS, never shied away from the gritty realities of life in public housing, touching on topics like racial bigotry, drug abuse and poverty — but all with a sense of humor.

Mr. Amos played James Evans Sr., a fierce disciplinarian with a tender heart who took on odd jobs to support his wife, Florida Evans (Esther Rolle), his sons Michael (Ralph Carter) and J.J. (Jimmie Walker), and his daughter, Thelma (Bern Nadette Stanis).

At one point, reminiscing with a childhood friend about his roots, James recounts how he used to be so poor that while other children had patches on their clothes, he had “patches on my patches!”

“Good Times” accrued high ratings and was lauded for making television history — it was one of the first sitcoms with an all-Black cast, preceding Mr. Lear’s “The Jeffersons” (1975-85). But Ms. Rolle and Mr. Amos felt that there were still inroads to be made by Black members of the production, and they pushed Mr. Lear to allow them to modify the scripts, which had largely been drafted by white writers.

“They’d go on about their credits,” Mr. Amos said of the writers in an interview with the SiriusXM program “Sway in the Morning.” Then he’d ask them, “‘Well, how long have you been Black? That just doesn’t happen in the community. We don’t think that way. We don’t act that way. We don’t let our children do that.’”

His outspokenness, while at first welcomed, eventually got him fired in 1976 for being a “disruptive element,” Mr. Amos said in the radio interview. He was written out of Season 4, killed off in an automobile accident.

“I had a way of voicing my differences with the script that weren’t acceptable to the creative staff,” Mr. Amos said.

“Roots,” a 1977 mini-series based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Alex Haley, is a family saga that begins with Kunta Kinte, a Mandinka teenager from The Gambia who is captured there, put in chains on a ship to America and enslaved on a Southern plantation in the 1700s. It then follows his descendants from colonialism to Civil War to Jim Crow, ending with Mr. Haley in modern times.

Mr. Amos was cast as the older version of Kunta Kinte, while LeVar Burton played the younger one. The show racked up 37 Primetime Emmy nominations — Mr. Amos received one for outstanding lead actor — and won nine. A record-breaking 100 million viewers tuned in for the finale.

The show’s impact went beyond ratings.

“Hundreds of colleges started Roots courses,” Frank Rich, later a critic and columnist for The New York Times, wrote in Time magazine. “The National Archives in Washington found itself flooded by citizens’ requests for information about their ancestors.”

The series “elevated the American consciousness” about the history of slavery and its modern day impact, Mr. Amos told the New York television channel NY1 in a 2022 interview marking the 45th anniversary of “Roots.”

John Allen Amos Jr. was born on Dec. 27, 1939, in Newark, N.J., to John and Annabelle Amos and grew up in East Orange, N.J. John Sr. was an auto mechanic. As a boy, John Jr. dreamed of becoming a football star.

After playing for Colorado State University, from which he graduated, and becoming a Golden Gloves boxing champion, he was signed by the Denver Broncos, but a hamstring injury led to his release on the second day of training camp. He later signed with the Kansas City Chiefs, but again was released.

After being cut from a team for the second time, and armed with a bottle of Jack Daniels while soaking in a tub, Mr. Amos recalled, he wrote a poem called “The Turk,” about his failed athletic aspirations. Before he left the Chiefs’ premises, he recited the poem to other players, who were “blown away” by it, he told The Los Angeles Times. It gave him new confidence in his ability to perform, he said.

After a stint as a standup comic in New York on the Greenwich Village circuit, Mr. Amos found work in 1969 as a staff writer for “The Leslie Uggams Show,” a musical variety revue. He also pursued acting, making his stage debut in Los Angeles in 1971 in a production of Ron Clark and Sam Bobrick’s comedy “Norman, Is That You?”

He eventually landed the lead role in a production of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Fences” in Albany, N.Y., and as a father figure opposite Denzel Washington in Dennis McIntyre’s police drama “Split Second.”

In the 1990s, Mr. Amos wrote and starred in a one-man show, about an 87-year-old man re-encountering Halley’s comet after first seeing it at age 11. (In 1999, he created the Halleys Comet Foundation to teach at-risk children how to sail on “a 68 foot vessel that looks like a pirate ship,” he told Black Film.)

Following the success of “Good Times” and “Roots,” Mr. Amos appeared in dozens of other TV shows well into his 80s, including “The West Wing,” “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “30 Rock,” “Two and a Half Men” and “The Righteous Gemstones.”

In film, he played Cleo McDowell, the father of Eddie Murphy’s character’s love interest in “Coming to America” (1988), and amassed numerous supporting parts, including in “Lock Up” (1989), starring Sylvester Stallone; “Die Hard 2” (1990); and “Dr. Doolittle 3” (2006). He also appeared in a slew of TV movies, such as “Disappearing Acts” (2000), starring Wesley Snipes.

In 2019, Mr. Amos made a cameo appearance, as himself, in the movie “Uncut Gems,” starring Adam Sandler.

He is survived by a daughter, Shannon, and a son, Kelly Christopher (who goes by K.C.), both from his first marriage, to Noel J. Mickelson, in 1965. He had no children from his second marriage, in 1978, to the actress Lillian Lehman. Both marriages ended in divorce.

In 2023, a family feud surfaced between Shannon and K.C., who accused each other publicly of neglecting to provide adequate care for their father as his health worsened. Mr. Amos dismissed the claims as “false and unmerited.” The Los Angeles Police Department closed their investigation into the matter in 2024, citing a lack of evidence.

In the early 2020s, Mr. Amos began working on a docuseries with his son about their relationship. It also provided a retrospective of his long career.

“We’re calling it ‘America’s Dad,’ because so many young men have come up to me and said, ‘Your father was my father,’” K.C. Amos told People magazine in 2023. “People of all walks of life — even guys who look like bikers with ZZ Top beards — have come up to me and said, ‘Can I give you a hug? Your father was my father, man.’ And they just want a chance to shake his hand.”

Kellina Moore contributed reporting.