There is something unusual in the fact that more than a month passed before the death of actor John Amos, 84, was announced Tuesday. But a powerful personality takes a while to come to a full stop. A Golden Gloves champion, a college football player and a minor league football player before transitioning into entertainment — first as a Greenwich Village stand-up, then writing for Leslie Uggams’ 1969 variety show, and finally graduating to the screen — Amos was built to play authority figures (or anti-authority figures).
Roles across his long, busy career have included reverend, inspector, captain, sergeant, doctor, coach, sheriff, pastor, mayor, deacon and, notably, Adm. Percy Fitzwallace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 22 episodes of “The West Wing,” prestige television before the letter. (When Amos met then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, Powell’s first words to him were “Percy Fitzwallace? What kind of name is that for a brother?”) Even “Gordy the weatherman,” as many of us first knew Amos, on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” fit the bill.
“Gordy was articulate,” Amos recalled in an interview with the Television Academy Foundation. “I liked the fact that he was a meteorologist [rather than a sportscaster] ‘cause it implies that the man could think, above X’s and O’s.” (In a running joke, he’d be mistaken for a sportscaster.
) And, of course, in the part for which he is arguably best known, he played a father — not the comic d.