Ron Thompson, the unheralded actor who starred on Broadway for Charles Gordone within the Pulitzer Prize-winning No Place to Be Any person and performed father and son musicians for Ralph Bakshi within the animated cult traditional American Pop, has died. He was 83.
Filmmaker Joe Black informed The Hollywood Reporter that he discovered Thompson in his Van Nuys residence on Saturday afternoon. The 2 had labored collectively in eight options, together with Hate Horses (2017), Chicks, Man (2018) and Suffrage (2023), and Black visited him a pair instances every week to assist him out.
“For a person of his age, he was so energetic, he had such a presence,” Black mentioned. He known as Thompson “the Sam Jackson to my Tarantino.”
In 1969, Thompson originated off-Broadway the function of Shanty Mulligan within the Joseph Papp-produced No Place to Be Any person, starring Ron O’Neal, then accompanied the drama to Broadway and on a tour across the nation.
In his evaluate for The New York Occasions, Mel Gussow wrote that Thompson was “splendid” in his flip as a “hip-talking, drum-playing white Uncle Tom who desperately wish to be Black.”
Robert Hooks, the Negro Ensemble Firm co-founder who knew Thompson from their days as New York actors, informed THR that his good buddy “stole that play from all people.” He mentioned he felt compelled to go backstage to satisfy Thompson after seeing No Place to Be Any person for the primary time.
“It might sound odd, however Ronnie Thompson is the one white actor I’ve ever identified who deserves to be included in Black Theatre Historical past,” Hooks wrote on Fb. “I’ve by no means identified a white actor completely unafraid to go to the emotionally bare locations that expose white jungle-fever delusion and switch it into heartbreaking pathos and excessive artwork.”
In American Pop (1981), Thompson portrayed the 2 lead characters, Tony Belinsky and his son, Pete. He and the opposite actors have been filmed for animators, who then would create cartoon characters out of them in a course of known as Rotoscoping, much like movement seize at the moment.
“Stay animators have been nonetheless working. They’d blow up the {photograph}, they’d then hint the actor, his bodily look, his motion, his expression, every thing, then draw within the background,” Thompson recalled in 2012. “It’s not simply the actor’s voice, you’re seeing the actor’s bodily likeness and whole efficiency, facial features, every thing!”
Born on Jan. 31, 1941, in Louisville, Kentucky, Phillip Thompson moved along with his household to Miami in 1945. Impressed to be an actor after seeing Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, he appeared as an additional in Jerry Lewis’ The Bellboy (1960), moved to New York when he was 19 and appeared on episodes of CBS’ Armstrong Circle Theater in 1962.
He additionally recorded singles below the steerage of rockabilly performer Ersel Hickey (“Bluebirds Over the Mountain”) and portrayed a rock singer in Brown Eye, Evil Eye (1968).
After No Place to Be Any person, Thompson appeared onstage alongside Henry Fonda, Richard Dreyfuss and Gloria Grahame in a 1972 revival of William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life in Los Angeles.
A yr later, he acquired an L.A. Critics Circle Award for his portrayal of Bickham in Does a Tiger Put on a Necktie? (A younger Al Pacino had received a Tony for enjoying the function in 1969.)
Thompson additionally recurred in 1975-76 as a rookie undercover cop named Nopke on the ABC crime collection Baretta, starring Robert Blake, and he guest-starred on such different exhibits as Mannix, Ironside, Amy Prentiss, The Streets of San Francisco, Bronk, Quincy, M.E., The Waltons and Cagney & Lacey.
His movie résumé included The White Buffalo (1977), American Me (1992) and Deep Cowl (1992).
Thompson was romantically concerned with late actress Diane Sommerfield (Days of Our Lives, The Black Godfather) within the Seventies. He has no identified survivors.