Robert Hooks

Robert Hooks, born Bobby Dean Hooks on April 18, 1937, in Foggy Bottom, Washington, D.C., is an American actor, producer, and activist. The youngest of five children born to Mae Bertha, a seamstress, and Edward Hooks, who had relocated from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, he was the first of his siblings to be born in Washington and the first born in a hospital. His father died in a railroad work accident in 1939. From ages six to twelve, Hooks traveled with his siblings to Lucama, North Carolina, to work tobacco fields on his uncle's sharecropping farm to help fund the family's school year expenses.

Hooks performed the lead role in The Pirates of Penzance at age nine, at the urging of his sister Bernice, who was conducting community arts outreach at Francis Junior High School. In 1954, he moved to Philadelphia to live with his mother and her second husband, attending West Philadelphia High School, where he joined the drama club and performed works by William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett. After graduating in 1956, he declined a scholarship to Temple University to train at the Bessie V. Hicks School of Theatre, where his classmates included Charles Dierkop and Bruce Dern. He supported himself working at Browning King, a men's tailor shop at Fourteenth and Chestnut Streets in Philadelphia.

After seeing A Raisin in the Sun during its Philadelphia tryout in February 1959, Hooks moved to New York to pursue acting. In April 1960, performing as Bobby Dean Hooks, he made his Broadway debut in A Raisin in the Sun, replacing Louis Gossett Jr., and subsequently joined the production's national tour. He then stepped into the Broadway production of A Taste of Honey, replacing Billy Dee Williams, and again followed the Broadway run with a national tour. In early 1962, he took over the male lead in Jean Genet's The Blacks, replacing James Earl Jones, before leaving briefly to appear on Broadway in Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright and then returning to The Blacks in 1963. He next appeared on Broadway in Ballad for Bimshire and then in the 1964 David Merrick revival of The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Any More, a production starring Tallulah Bankhead and Tab Hunter in his only stage performance, in which Hooks played a character Tennessee Williams created specifically for that revival.

On March 24, 1964, Hooks originated the role of Clay in Amiri Baraka's Dutchman. On the advice of Roscoe Lee Brown, he adopted the professional name Robert Hooks at that time. That same year, he originated a role in Where's Daddy?, for which he received the Theatre World Award in 1966. His Broadway work continued through 1967, encompassing productions including The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui and Hallelujah, Baby!, for which he was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Male Lead in a Musical. He received the Drama Desk Vernon Rice Award in 1968.

In 1964, following a speaking engagement at the Chelsea Civil Rights Committee, Hooks founded the Group Theatre Workshop, a tuition-free program for disadvantaged urban teenagers interested in acting. Instructors included Barbara Ann Teer, Frances Foster, Hal DeWindt, Lonne Elder III, and Ronnie Mack, and alumni included Antonio Fargas, Hattie Winston, and Daphne Maxwell Reid. The Group Theatre Workshop was subsequently folded into the training arm of the Negro Ensemble Company, which Hooks co-founded in 1967 alongside Douglas Turner Ward and Gerald S. Krone with a $1.3 million grant from the Ford Foundation under W. McNeil Lowry. The Negro Ensemble Company is credited with launching the careers of numerous major Black artists across disciplines and building a body of African-American theatrical literature.

Hooks is also the sole founder of two additional Black theatre organizations: the D.C. Black Repertory Company and New York's Group Theatre Workshop. The D.C. Black Repertory Company, which operated from 1970 to 1981, was established in response to the 1968 Washington, D.C., riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., aided by a grant from the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation. Hooks took a leave of absence from the Negro Ensemble Company to create it, intending the organization as an exploration of the arts as a vehicle for healing. The a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock was created and developed within its workshop process. Through the D.C. Black Repertory Company, Hooks also structured the Inner Voices program at Lorton Prison in 1971, which became the first prison-based arts training program in the United States. The Inner Voices performed more than 500 times in other prisons. Following the advocacy work of inmate Rhozier Brown, President Gerald Ford commuted Brown's sentence on Christmas Day, 1975.

From 1969 to 1972, Hooks served as an original board member of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters, chartered by the State of New York, whose membership included James Baldwin, Alvin Ailey, Harry Belafonte, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, Sidney Poitier, and Nina Simone, among others.

While starring on Broadway in Hallelujah, Baby!, Hooks was simultaneously appearing in David Susskind's television drama N.Y.P.D., making him the second African-American lead in a television drama series, following Bill Cosby on I Spy. In 1968, he hosted the public affairs television program Like It Is. His film roles include Reeve Scott in Hurry Sundown (1967), Mr. T. in Trouble Man (1972), Fleet Admiral Morrow in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), and Gene Donovan in Seventeen Again (2000). He appeared in an episode of The Eddie Capra Mysteries in 1978 and portrayed Doctor Walcott in the television series Dynasty. He won an Emmy Award for his PBS special Voices of Our People and has received both the Pioneer Award and the NAACP Image Award for Lifetime Achievement. He has also been inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame. His Tony Award credits include a win for Best Play in 1974.