Ron O'Neal

Ron O'Neal (September 1, 1937 – January 14, 2004) was an American actor, director, and screenwriter born in Utica, New York, who became one of the most recognizable figures of the blaxploitation era through his portrayal of cocaine dealer Youngblood Priest in the 1972 film Super Fly and its 1973 sequel, Super Fly T.N.T.

O'Neal was raised in a working-class neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio, by his mother Eunice and his father Ernest, a former jazz musician who supported the family through factory work. Ernest died when O'Neal was sixteen, and six months later O'Neal's brother, a truck driver, was killed in an accident. His mother subsequently took a job at a hospital to support the family. O'Neal graduated from Glenville High School and enrolled at Ohio State University, where a production of Finian's Rainbow sparked his interest in acting. He joined the Karamu House company in Cleveland in 1957, working with the oldest African-American theatre company in the United States until 1964. During those years he appeared in productions including Kiss Me, Kate, A Streetcar Named Desire, and A Raisin in the Sun, while supporting himself as a housepainter.

In 1964, O'Neal relocated to New York, where he taught acting at the Harlem Youth Arts Program and performed in Off-Broadway productions. His Broadway career began in 1969 with an appearance in Ceremonies in Dark Old Men. That same year he appeared in Charles Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody, a Pulitzer Prize-winning play for which he co-won an Obie Award with Nathan George, along with a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance and a Theatre World Award. He returned to Broadway with All Over, and his stage credits through 1974 also include No Place to Be Somebody. In 1975, he stepped into a replacement role in All Over Town, directed by Dustin Hoffman. During the 1970s he also performed in Shakespeare productions, including Othello, Macbeth, and The Taming of the Shrew.

O'Neal's transition to film began with minor roles in Move (1970) and The Organization (1971). A suggestion from Cleveland screenwriter Phillip Fenty led him to star in Super Fly (1972), a low-budget production about a New York City drug dealer that became a major box office success. O'Neal reprised the role of Youngblood Priest in Super Fly T.N.T. (1973), which he also directed and co-wrote, though the sequel performed poorly at the box office. He also directed and wrote for the film Up Against the Wall. The prominence of the Youngblood Priest character contributed to O'Neal being frequently typecast as a pimp or drug dealer in subsequent years.

Roles that moved beyond those stock characters included the film Brothers (1977), the television movie Brave New World (1980), and the miniseries The Sophisticated Gents (1981). He played the Cuban Colonel Ernesto Bella, the primary antagonist, in the 1984 film Red Dawn. That same year, on November 17, 1984, O'Neal was stabbed at a restaurant in West Hollywood following an argument. He went on to play the recurring role of police detective Isadore Smalls across three seasons of the television series The Equalizer, which starred British actor Edward Woodward. From 1988 through 1992, he appeared as Mercer Gilbert, the wealthy father of Whitley Gilbert (played by Jasmine Guy), on the NBC sitcom A Different World. In 1996, he appeared in the blaxploitation reunion film Original Gangstas.

O'Neal was married twice: first to actress Carol Tillery Banks from November 1973 until their divorce in 1980, and then to Audrey Pool from 1993 until his death. He died in Los Angeles on January 14, 2004, following a four-year battle with pancreatic cancer, on the same day Super Fly was released on DVD in the United States. The Wu-Tang Clan's 2014 album A Better Tomorrow includes a track titled "Ron O'Neal."