Ron O'Neal

Ron O'Neal was an American actor and screenwriter who also directed, and he grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, in a working-class neighborhood. He got his start with the Karamu House company there, from 1957 to 1964, then moved to New York, where he taught acting and worked in Off-Broadway plays. He appeared on Broadway in Ceremonies in Dark Old Men in 1969 and won a shared Obie Award for No Place to Be Somebody. After small parts in Move (1970) and The Organization (1971), he starred as the drug dealer Youngblood Priest in the blaxploitation hit Super Fly (1972), then directed and wrote its sequel, Super Fly T.N.T. (1973). Typecasting followed, but he kept working in television, notably The Equalizer and A Different World, and in films such as Red Dawn (1984). He died in 2004.