Yaphet Kotto may be best known to moviegoers these days as the man who killed Freddy Krueger.
But they may also remember him as the villainous Kananga from "Live and Let Die." Or for his role as Hollywood's first black man in space in "Alien." In fact, Kotto has played striking roles in more than 35 films in the last 27 years."Those who don't recognize the name recognize the face," Kotto says in a telephone interview from his home in Conifer. "After 25 years of movies and 10 or 15 hits it's becoming impossible to walk around without being mobbed."
Kotto is currectly featured in "Freddy's Dead," the new, sixth - and allegedly final - installment of the "A Nightmare on Elm Street" saga. Kotto plays Doc, the dream researcher who figures out how to finally get rid of the monstrous antihero. But once upon a time, Kotto himself relished playing the antihero.
When Kotto began acting in film in the 1960s, he was a black actor trying to fit into an industry that nourished only one other black actor - the revered Sidney Poitier.
"I was the antithesis of Poitier's characterizations," Kotto says. "Poitier was always building churches for nuns or saving some blond chick. I'm not putting him down, but I wanted to be like Bogart or Cagney. I wanted to be real, not a symbol. I want to be an entertainer, not leverage for some social ill."
Kotto says his attitude was something the Hollywood establishment wasn't sure how to deal with. "You can't imagine the shock Hollywood had. They were dealing with black guys who were doing the Hollywood shuffle for them. But this guy comes in, he's 6 foot 3 and looks like he's going to explode at any second. He can act, and he's a method actor to boot, and he's moody and all the rest.
"It was a whole new number for them."
Kotto said his breakthrough was in "The Liberation of L.B. Jones" in 1970. "That probably was the first time Hollywood ever cast a black man other than Poitier in a leading role," he said. "It featured the first black antihero ever on the screen. My character carried out the ultimate violation of murder and escaped all the Southern antagonists who were perpetrating violence on his people."
In fact, a key murder scene from that film was a bone of contention between Kotto and director William Wyler. Kotto was to kill a man by shoving him into a threshing machine, and Wyler wanted Kotto to cry on screen before the murder. Kotto saw Wyler's request as an attempt to soften the impact of the violence of a black man against a white man and wouldn't stand for it.
"We had this discussion all day and then an argument all night and I was telling Wyler that it was no good," Kotto explains. "It was just like the movies of the '30s, '40s and '50s. And finally Wyler said, `You're right, do it that way."'
Two years after the release of that film, Kotto tried his own hand at filmmaking. He wrote, produced, directed and starred in "Time Limit," a movie about Los Angeles motorcycle police.
"It was shot for $400,000 and it made money. It's probably still making money somewhere, and it gave a lot of people the idea that a black man could direct a film," Kotto adds.
These days critics and moviegoers are paying more attention to the work of black actors and directors, but Kotto thinks their successes may be more attributable to a hungry black audience than to any change in the industry's way of thinking.
"After `The Liberation of L.B. Jones,' one black exploitation film after another came out with black men killing white villains on the screen," Kotto says. "Studios stopped making them because some black people said they were exploitative and were not good.
"So 10 years went past and Robert Townsend made his little film and Spike Lee made his little film and there was a whole new surge of black people saying `This is where it's at.' Hollywood goes where the dollar is. If it makes money, it's in."
Kotto was "in" all through the '70s and '80s. He was cast as James Bond's adversary in "Live and Let Die," which he said "earmarked another page in Hollywood history." He starred with Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel in "Blue Collar"; with Sigourney Weaver in "Alien"; with Michael Douglas in "The Star Chamber."
He eventually became enough of a celebrity that he found himself being recognized by people on the street, shoppers in supermarkets and even teenagers at a British shopping mall.
That universal recognition keeps Kotto living in Colorado, away from the big cities. "I'm a recluse here," he said. "I can get around without having to live behind a gate and thousands of security guards."
He came out of hiding during the Denver mayoral campaign to help his friend, District Attorney Norm Early. (Early lost.) But Kotto prefers to keep far out of the limelight.
"I want to work, but I don't want to exploit acting," he said. "You have to deal with the Enquirer and those punk magazines. No one knows what I do and that's the way I want it."
And what does this newest venture mean for Kotto's career?
"It's a hit," he said. "I already feel like an institution of some kind, and they tell me this film made $35 million in four days. What that does is put an actor in a very comfortable artistic and professional spot.
"This business is a little scary, because when you're a black actor you don't think you'll last two summers. I've been around almost 30 years and I thought maybe the '90s would be the end for me - but when they start like this I don't worry."