Calvin Lockhart

Calvin Lockhart, born Bert McClossy Cooper on October 18, 1934, in Nassau, Bahamas, was a Bahamian actor whose career spanned Broadway, film, and television across several decades. The youngest of eight children, Lockhart was the son of Eric Cooper, a Bahamian tailor born around 1912 or 1913 who died in 1976. At eighteen, Lockhart relocated to New York City, where he spent a year at the Cooper Union School of Engineering before abandoning that path to pursue acting. During his early years in New York, he supported himself by driving a taxi and running a carpentry business in Queens.

Lockhart made his Broadway debut in 1960, taking on the role of a gang leader in The Cool World, a stage adaptation of Warren Miller's novel of the same name. The production closed after only two performances. He returned to Broadway in Reggae, with his stage work spanning the period from 1960 to 1980. Following his initial Broadway appearance, Lockhart traveled to Italy, where he founded his own theater company in which he served as both actor and director. He subsequently moved to West Germany and then to England, where he secured roles on British television and appeared in small film parts, including the 1968 productions A Dandy in Aspic and Salt and Pepper.

His first significant screen role came in the 1968 film Joanna, directed by Michael Sarne, a story of interracial romance set in London. Sarne later cast Lockhart in Myra Breckinridge. Lockhart's first lead film role came in Halls of Anger in 1970, in which he played a former basketball star who becomes vice-principal of an inner-city high school receiving sixty white transfer students. That same year he appeared in Cotton Comes to Harlem, based on the Chester Himes novel, portraying the Reverend Deke O'Malley — a role for which he became widely recognized. In 1974, Lockhart joined the Royal Shakespeare Company as an actor-in-residence in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. That same year he starred in The Beast Must Die, playing a millionaire big-game hunter, a performance that earned him a following among horror film audiences. His character's name in the 1975 Warner Bros. film Let's Do It Again, Biggie Smalls, was later adopted by musician Christopher Wallace for a 1991 demo and continued to be used by media and associates even after a lawsuit compelled Wallace to change his professional name to The Notorious B.I.G.

In the 1980s, Lockhart appeared as Jonathan Lake in seven episodes of the prime-time soap opera Dynasty. He also made small appearances in two films directed by David Lynch: Wild at Heart in 1990 and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me in 1992. During the late 1970s, Lockhart led a Los Angeles anti-drug initiative called "Getting Off Drugs," aimed at steering teenagers away from drug use. In the late 1990s, he returned to the Bahamas, where he worked as a director on productions for the Freeport Players Guild. His final film role was in Rain, shot in the Bahamas and released in 2007.

Lockhart was married three times and had two sons. In 1972 he married Jamaican model Thelma Walters; the marriage ended in divorce in 1978. In August 1982 he married British businesswoman Lynn Sloan in the Bahamas, and that marriage also ended in divorce. He met his third wife, Jennifer Miles, in 1979, and the couple had a son, actor Julien Lockhart Miles, born in 1981; they married in 2006. Lockhart's other son is named Leslie Lockhart. Lockhart died on March 29, 2007, in a Nassau hospital from stroke-related complications at the age of 72.