“I am what I am,” he told a New York Times reporter not long after 'Shaft' made him a star. 'And I’m gonna be that way until the day when they put the number on my stone.”
It is so all there, in the first two minutes. Manhattan, 1971. Noise. Grime. The mean streets two years before Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets.” Isaac Hayes’ “Theme from Shaft” — still the greatest-ever Oscar-winning song, just ahead of “Thanks for the Memory” — strides in underneath the “Shaft” opening credits sequence at the 30-second mark, as the camera glides by a grindhouse marquee advertising “The Wild Females.
He was very, very good at his job. And then he became an actor. He joined the off-Broadway Negro Ensemble Company, eventually playing boxer Jack Johnson in “The Great White Hope.” Roundtree started figuring out the performance distinctions between modeling and acting. Later, he said he knew so little about filmmaking and acting for the camera that when director Parks cast him as Shaft, he didn’t really get comfortable with the role and the production until it was nearly finished.
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