John Amos, ‘Good Times’ Dad, Dies at 84
John Amos, the TV writer turned Emmy-nominated actor who starred as the stoic father on Good Times before he was fired from the landmark sitcom for objecting to stereotypes and admittedly letting his temper get the best of him, has died. He was 84.
Amos died Aug. 21 in Los Angeles of natural causes, his son, K.C. Amos, announced.
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“It is with heartfelt sadness that I share with you that my father has transitioned,” he said in a statement. “He was a man with the kindest heart and a heart of gold … and he was loved the world over. Many fans consider him their TV father. He lived a good life. His legacy will live on in his outstanding works in television and film as an actor.”
Amos, who played football at Colorado State University and had training camp tryouts with the Denver Broncos and Kansas City Chiefs of the American Football League, saw his showbiz career take off after he landed a gig to play WJM-TV weatherman Gordy Howard on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
The New Jersey native received his Emmy nom for portraying Toby, the older version of Kunta Kinte, on the acclaimed 1977 ABC miniseries Roots, and he had a recurring role as Admiral Percy Fitzwallace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on NBC’s West Wing.
His career on the big screen began with Melvin Van Peebles‘ blaxploitation classic Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), and he played the manager of a McDonald’s-like restaurant who hires an African prince (Eddie Murphy) and his right-hand man (Arsenio Hall) in Coming to America (1988).
Many years earlier, Amos had been in the McDonald’s training program before appearing as an employee for the fast-food chain in a well-known ’70s commercial (“Grab a bucket and mop, scrub the bottom and top!”) that he said helped put his kids through college.
After showing up a dozen times as the good-natured Gordy on the first four seasons of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the barrel-chested Amos was invited to read for the part of James Evans Sr., the husband of Esther Rolle’s Florida Evans and father of their three kids, on a new CBS series, Good Times.
The 1974-79 show, created by Eric Monte and Mike Evans and developed by Norman Lear, was set in an inner-city Chicago apartment located in the projects (think Cabrini-Green). A spinoff of Maude (itself a descendant of All in the Family), Good Times was the first sitcom to center on an African-American family.
“Everybody knew who Norman Lear was,” Amos said in a 2014 interview for the Television Academy Foundation. “I’d seen the pilot episode of All in the Family and thought, ‘There’s no way in the world they’re going to put that on television.’ … Sure enough, it became a hit.
“So I went in and read with Miss Rolle for Norman Lear, with just the three of us in his office. When we finished the reading, Norman looked at Esther, and Esther looked at me and looked at Norman and said, ‘He’ll do just fine.'”
Amos starred on the show for three seasons, but he soon disapproved of the silly, stereotypical storylines that surrounded their oldest son on the series, J.J. — played by the comic Jimmie Walker — and he went public with his criticism.
“We had a number of differences,” he said. “I felt too much emphasis was being put on J.J. in his chicken hat, saying ‘Dy-no-mite!’ every third page. I felt just as much emphasis and mileage could have been gotten out of my other two children, one of whom aspired to become a Supreme Court justice, played by Ralph Carter, and the other, BernNadette Stanis, who aspired to become a surgeon.
“But I wasn’t the most diplomatic guy in those days, and [the show’s producers] got tired of having their lives threatened over jokes. So they said, ‘Tell you what, why don’t we kill him off? We can get on with our lives!’ That taught me a lesson — I wasn’t as important as I thought I was to the show or to Norman Lear’s plans.”
James Evans Sr. was the victim of a car accident in a two-part episode that aired in September 1976 to kick off season four.
John Alan Amos Jr. was born on Dec. 27, 1939, in Newark, New Jersey. His father drove a tractor-trailer and worked as a mechanic, and his mother, Annabelle, was a housekeeper who eventually went back to school and became a nutritionist.
His mom cleaned the home of a cartoonist who drew for the Archie comics, and that led to Amos and a buddy attending a taping of radio’s The Archie Show at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. “It blew my imagination wide open,” he said.
“I was disappointed in a way, because none of them looked like Archie or Jughead or Veronica … Some of the magic disappeared, but the science of the industry became apparent to me.”
At East Orange High School, Amos drew cartoons and wrote columns for the school newspaper, played a convict in a production of The Man Who Came to Dinner and was a star running back.
Amos won football scholarships to Long Beach City College in California and then Colorado State University, where the Rams had the longest losing streak in the nation at the time.
“God kept telling me, ‘I don’t want you playing football,'” he said. “The direction I was getting from above was to be a performer, to be a writer, something that I had always done and came easy for me.”
Still, Amos did not give up his dream of playing pro football, signing his first free-agent contract with the Broncos. (One of his training camp teammates was Ernie Barnes, whose painting, Sugar Shack, appeared in the opening credits of Good Times.)
Amos played or tried out to play with many teams, including the Norfolk Neptunes of the Continental Football League and the British Columbia Lions of the Canadian Football League.
After the Chiefs cut him for a second time, Coach Hank Stram allowed him to read a poem about shattered dreams to the players — and he received a standing ovation. “It was the first confirmation I got from my peers that I could write material that could evoke emotions in people,” he said. “It was very gratifying, much more so than running off-tackle or trying to pick up a blitz.”
(Amos would play a retired player struggling with injuries from his NFL days on the HBO series Ballers.)
In Vancouver, Amos did stand-up and met a television writer who encouraged him to come to Los Angeles, where he landed a writing and performing job on a syndicated TV variety show hosted by radio personalities Al Lohman and Roger Barkley. (Also getting their starts on that program: McLean Stevenson, Craig T. Nelson and Barry Levinson.)
That in turn led to work writing and performing in sketches on the 1969 CBS variety program The Leslie Uggams Show. Two producers there, Lorenzo Music and Dave Davis, were helping to develop a series for Mary Tyler Moore and thought he’d be great for that.
“They could very easily have said, ‘Well, [Gordy] can be a sports announcer.’ That would have been [as easy as] falling off a log for me,” he recalled. “I liked the fact that he was a meteorologist; that implied the man could think.”
On the 1973-74 season of Maude, Amos appeared on three episodes as Florida’s husband, setting up the launch of Good Times.
James Evans struggled to find full-time work, but “he provided for his family with any job that he could find. We managed to survive, and America loved that show. It was close to how most Americans lived at that time.”
In his TV Academy Foundation interview, Amos got emotional when he noted that he had “young men, in their 30s and 40, of every ethnicity imaginable, come up to me and say, ‘You’re the dad I never had.'”
After he left Good Times, Lear’s company hired him to play a congressman on the pilot for a new show called Onward and Upward. But he would quit that project as well.
Amos had traveled several times to Africa, including living for months at a time in Liberia “to absorb the culture of the continent that I had come from, indirectly,” when he was approached to appear in Roots.
“It was just what I needed,” he said. “It took the bad taste of Good Times out of my mouth — not that Good Times had been all bad, but the circumstances under which I left and the acrimony between Norman Lear and myself … I realize that a lot of it I brought on myself. I was not the easiest guy in the world to get along with, or to direct. I challenged any and everybody. [Roots] was a vindication, a tremendous feeling of satisfaction.”
He and Lear eventually got over it, and Amos starred for the producer in a short-lived 1994 sitcom, 704 Hauser, about a liberal family living in Archie Bunker’s former house in Queens.
Amos also had recurring roles on other TV shows like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, on which he played Will Smith’s stepfather; Hunter; The District; Men in Trees; All About the Andersons, as Anthony Anderson’s dad; and the Netflix drama The Ranch.
His film résumé also included The World’s Greatest Athlete (1973), Let’s Do It Again (1975), The Beastmaster (1982), Die Hard 2 (1990), Ricochet (1991), Mac (1992), Night Trap (1993), For Better or Worse (1995), The Players Club (1998), Coming to America 2 (2021) and Because of Charley (2021).
In 1972, he appeared on Broadway in Tough to Get Help, directed by Carl Reiner.
When he found it tough to get work in the 1990s, Amos wrote and starred in the one-man play Halley’s Comet, about an 87-year-old man who ruminates about the state of the world while he waits in the woods for the coming of “the comet.” He toured all over the U.S. and in several overseas cities with the play for more than two decades.
More recently, he and his son produced the documentary America’s Dad.
In addition to K.C. (nicknamed for Amos’ days with the Chiefs), survivors include his daughter, Shannon, both from his first marriage to Noel “Noni” Mickelson. THR’s Gary Baum wrote about his kids’ acrimonious relationship in November.
Amos also was briefly married to actress Lillian Lehman, who played Andre Braugher‘s mother on Men of a Certain Age.
Duane Byrge contributed to this report.
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