A lifetime of playing character roles may not have exactly made Yaphet Kotto into Hollywood royalty; but he doesn't have to settle. He's the real thing: though a lifelong New Yorker, Kotto is the son of a genuine Cameroonian prince, the great-grandson of the king of the Douala people in the late 1800s, and (according to the man himself — and are you going to call Yaphet Kotto a liar?), the great-great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria. That ought to get him a seat on the House of Lords and nice swanky country estate, but until his relatives stop treating him like, er, the black sheep of the family, he'll have to keep on being one of our all-time favorite African-American character actors. It's easy to see why Kotto is often cast as a soldier or a tough cop: even at age seventy, he struts through life in his powerfully built 6'4"-inch frame looking as if he owns the place. Although he resembles nothing less than a real-life John Shaft, with his strong features and a wide grin that hovers between gregarious and feral, he hasn't always had an easy time of it: in addition to being born with the wrong color skin to make it as a Hollywood superstar in the '50s and '60s, Yaphet Kotto is also a devout Jew, going back generations to his African roots.
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