Yaphet Kotto - welcome

American actor Yaphet Kotto is one of the most prominent beneficiaries of the upsurge in black-oriented theatrical pieces of the late 1960s; 1970, 1980's 1990's and even now in 2009, he ranks high as a superstar.He has appeared in many prestigious Broadway and off-Broadway productions, taking regional theatre work rather than accept stereotypical "mainstream" roles in movies and TV. Kotto's first film was Nothing But a Man (1964), an independently produced study of black pride in the face of white indifference.

Though he vehemently steered clear of most of the '70s blaxploitation fare, in 1972, Kotto produced, directed and wrote the feature film Speed Limit 65 (aka The Limit and Time Limit), a one-of-a-kind "black biker" film.

Some of the biggest moneymakers with which Kotto was associated in the early 1970s was the James Bond film Live and Let Die, in which, as the villainous Mr. Big, he was blown up in the final scene (a similarly grisly fate awaited Kotto in 1979's Alien). In the Eighties "Midnight Run" with Robert Deniro and the list goes on amounting in over 69 mmajor films. On television, Yaphet Kotto was a regular on the TV series For Love and Honor (1983) and Homicide: Life on the Streets (1992), and was seen as Ugandan president Idi Amin in the 1977 TV movie Raid on Entebbe..