Actor Brock Peters Dies at 78

Brock Peters, one of the country’s leading African-American actors and a Tony Award nominee for his performance in the 1972 revival of the Kurt Weill-Maxwell Anderson musical Lost in the Stars, died of pancreatic cancer on August 23 in Los Angeles. He was 78.

As a teenager, Peters sang in the ensemble of the 1943 revival of Porgy and Bess under his real name, Brock Fisher. He went on to appear in five more Broadway shows, all of them short-lived: Norman Rosten’s play Mister Johnson (1956); The Body Beautiful (1958), a musical by Sheldon Harnick, Jerry Bock, and Joseph Stein; Richard Adler’s musical Kwamina (1961); a 1968 production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle; and as Stephen Kumalo in Lost in the Stars, a role he reprised in the 1974 film version. Peters’ other stage credits include productions of Othello, The Great White Hope, and Driving Miss Daisy.

His film career spanned nearly 50 years, beginning with the role of Sergeant Brown in Carmen Jones (1954). Five years later, he was reunited with that film’s star, Dorothy Dandridge, when he portrayed Crown in the film version of Porgy and Bess. Among his other notable films are To Kill a Mockingbird, The L-Shaped Room, The Pawnbroker, and Soylent Green. On television, Peters appeared in the miniseries Roots: The Next Generation and in the popular soap operas The Young and the Restless and As the World Turns.

Peters served as the chairman of the California State Arts Commission. He was a member of the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame and received awards from the National Film Society and the Screen Actors Guild. He is survived by his companion, Marilyn Darby, and his daughter, Lisa Jo Peters.