Davis “had dinner with Rowan and Martin,” he recalled. While in town, he met influential CBS casting director Ethel Winant, “and by the time I got back to New York, I had a series” - The Leslie Uggams Show.īrown was on Laugh-In for a year before he learned why he was hired for that. He came to Los Angeles when Neil Simon asked him to play a waiter on a train in The Out of Towners (1970). and David Steinberg, the comedy lasted but a week. Despite a cast that featured Cicely Tyson, Diane Ladd, Louis Gossett Jr. Brown took over as Ronnie and took the lead on the show-stopping number “Don’t Forget 127th Street” as Golden Boy lasted more than 500 performances.īrown made his film debut portraying a blind pianist in the Davis-starring drama A Man Called Adam (1966) - future Good Times co-star Ja’Net DuBois also was in that - and returned to Broadway in 1968 for Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights, directed by Sidney Poitier. Cambridge couldn’t “get out of a contract, so he started arguing every day until two days before opening for previews.” Like Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor and those guys, if an album sold, they could make big concert money,” Brown said. “In those days, a big thing for a comedian was an album. (Brown said he had never even seen a Broadway show before that.)īut then Cambridge began bickering with director Arthur Penn. In 1964, when Davis was preparing to star in a musical adaptation of Golden Boy on Broadway, he got Brown a gig as Godfrey Cambridge’s understudy. “I wanted to be a well-rounded, complete entertainer I didn’t just want to sing or tell a joke.” “He did all the things I wanted to do,” Brown said in a 1996 interview. While working in the Catskills, Brown met Sammy Davis Jr., and the legendary entertainer would prove to be an inspiration. and recorded songs for Columbia and Atlantic records. He won an amateur night competition at the Apollo Theater starred in nightclub acts with his future wife, June, and with tap dancer Gregory Hines Jr. Petersburg, Florida, and raised in Harlem. Now at my age, I would have to say something.”īrown was born on June 11, 1937, in St. I couldn’t say anything because I have a wife and two kids to support. They used it when I walked in the show, all through the scene. … They even had Janet, who had just come on the show, answering like Mr. “With everybody ‘buffalo butt’ in a scene, it loses something. “Sometimes you can do too much of a thing, and it doesn’t come natural,” Brown said in 2019. (Jimmie Walker) and other members of the Evans family. His character was often teased about his weight by the gangly J.J. With former Laugh-In writer Allan Manings serving as a producer on Good Times, Brown joined the Chicago-set CBS comedy in 1975 midway through its second season. Emmy-Winning Writer, Comedian Kevin Rooney, Who Worked With Jay Leno and Dennis Miller, Dies at 71
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