Julius Harris, pioneering actor

LOS ANGELES – Julius Harris, a stage and screen performer who moved beyond stereotypical movie roles for black actors, died here on Sunday.

He was 81. The cause was heart failure, a spokesman for the Motion Picture and Television Hospital said.Harris played the villainous Tee Hee in the James Bond film ‘Live and Let Die’ and a gangster in the 1972 ‘Superfly’.Harris, a former member of the Negro Ensemble Company in New York, played diverse roles in his long acting career.He appeared in more than 70 film and television productions in roles that included a preacher who headed a slave group in the 1982 Civil War miniseries ‘The Blue and the Gray’ and President Idi Amin of Uganda in the television movie ‘Victory at Entebbe’.”Even today, if I am walking in a black neighbourhood, people call me by my ‘Superfly’ name – Scatter,” Harris told The Los Angeles Times last October before being honoured with a tribute at the Directors Guild of America Theater.Harris’s mother was a Cotton Club dancer, and his father was a musician.Harris, a Philadelphia native, served as an Army medic during World War II and found work as an orderly and a nurse after leaving the service in 1950.He eventually moved to New York, where he landed his first role as a drunken, defeated father in ‘Nothing But A Man’, a critically acclaimed 1964 film about black life in the South starring Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln.Harris is survived by his children, Kimberly and Gideon.- Nampa-APThe cause was heart failure, a spokesman for the Motion Picture and Television Hospital said.Harris played the villainous Tee Hee in the James Bond film ‘Live and Let Die’ and a gangster in the 1972 ‘Superfly’.Harris, a former member of the Negro Ensemble Company in New York, played diverse roles in his long acting career.He appeared in more than 70 film and television productions in roles that included a preacher who headed a slave group in the 1982 Civil War miniseries ‘The Blue and the Gray’ and President Idi Amin of Uganda in the television movie ‘Victory at Entebbe’.”Even today, if I am walking in a black neighbourhood, people call me by my ‘Superfly’ name – Scatter,” Harris told The Los Angeles Times last October before being honoured with a tribute at the Directors Guild of America Theater.Harris’s mother was a Cotton Club dancer, and his father was a musician.Harris, a Philadelphia native, served as an Army medic during World War II and found work as an orderly and a nurse after leaving the service in 1950.He eventually moved to New York, where he landed his first role as a drunken, defeated father in ‘Nothing But A Man’, a critically acclaimed 1964 film about black life in the South starring Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln.Harris is survived by his children, Kimberly and Gideon.- Nampa-AP