Calvin Lockhart, a strikingly handsome, Bahamian-born actor whose on-screen heyday in the 1970s included prominent roles in Cotton Comes to Harlem and Uptown Saturday Night, has died. He was 72.
Mr. Lockhart died of complications of a stroke March 29 in a hospital in Nassau, Bahamas, said his wife, Jennifer Miles-Lockhart.
Described by a New York Times writer in 1970 as having “matinee idol looks,” with “chiseled-out-of-marble features” and “skin the color of brown velvet,” Mr. Lockhart had his first starring film role that year in Halls of Anger, a racially explosive drama in which he played an ex-basketball star-teacher who becomes vice principal in an inner-city high school where 60 white students are being bused in.
The same year, he played the smooth-talking preacher-con artist in Cotton Comes to Harlem. Mr. Lockhart’s first notable screen role had been in Joanna, the London-set 1968 film starring Genevieve Waite about an interracial romance in which Mr. Lockhart played Waite’s nightclub-operator boyfriend.
It was a role that “marked him as a very gifted young man,” said Sidney Poitier, who directed Mr. Lockhart in the 1970s comedies Uptown Saturday Night and Let’s Do It Again, both of which starred Poitier and Bill Cosby. Mr. Lockhart played underworld characters in both films.
Born Bert Cooper in Nassau on Oct. 18, 1934, he moved to New York at 18.
