The versatile performer played building super Nathan Bookman on the sitcom, starred with Sammy Davis Jr. on Broadway and was a regular on 'Laugh-In.'
Actor, comedian and singer Johnny Brown, best known for portraying housing project superintendent Nathan Bookman on Good Times, has died. He was 84 years old.
Brown died Wednesday, his daughter, actress Sharon Katherine Brown, announced on Instagram. “Our family is devastated. Devastated. Devastated. Heartbroken beyond. Barely able to breathe,” she wrote.
Further information about his death was not immediately available.
Brown also recorded songs and performed in a band with saxophonist Sam "The Man" Taylor, appeared twice on Broadway in the 1960s and was a regular performer for three seasons on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In.
Brown, who made an average impression of Louis Armstrong and others, was a major contender to play Lamont opposite Red Fox on Sanford & Son, but because his contract obliged him to laugh-in, the role was played by Daymond Wilson. went near.
Along with serving as a producer on Good Times with former Laugh-In writer Alan Mannings, Brown joined the Chicago-set CBS comedy in 1975 through its second season. His character is often referred to as gangly JJ about his weight. (Jimmy Walker) and other members of the Evans family.
"Sometimes you can do too much, and it just doesn't come naturally," Brown said in 2019. "In a scene with everyone [calling Bookman] 'Buffalo Butt', it loses something. ... They also had Janet [Jackson], who had just come on the show, of Mr. Buffalo Butt. Was answering.
"And he used it in every show. When I walked in the show, he used it throughout the scene. He used it when I left the scene. I couldn't say anything because I have a wife and two kids. . Now at my age I have something to say."
Brown was born on June 11, 1937, in St. Petersburg, Florida, and raised in Harlem. He won an amateur nightly contest at the Apollo Theater; starred in nightclub acts with his future wife, June, and tap dancer Gregory Hines Jr. and drummer Gregory Hines Sr.; and recorded songs for Columbia and Atlantic Records.
While working in the Catskills, Brown met Sammy Davis Jr., and the great entertainer would prove to be an inspiration. "He did everything I wanted to do," Brown said in a 1996 interview. “I wanted to be a complete, complete entertainer; I didn't just want to sing or tell a joke."
In 1964, when Davis was preparing to star in a musical adaptation of Golden Boy on Broadway, he got a gig as the understudy of Godfrey Cambridge to Brown. (Brown said he had never even seen a Broadway show before.)
But then the Cambridges started feuding with director Arthur Penn. “In those days, a big thing for a comedian was an album. Like Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor and those guys, if an album sells, they can make money at the big concert,” Brown said. Couldn't get out of the contract, so he started arguing every day until two days before he opened for previews."
That's when Cambridge was fired. Brown took over as Ronnie and took the lead on the show-stopping number "Don't Forget 127th Street" as Golden Boy went on for over 500 performances.
Brown made his film debut playing a blind pianist in the Davis-starring play A Man Called Adam (1966)—future Good Times co-star Ja'nette Dubois was also in it—and in 1968's Carry Me Back to returned to Broadway for Morningside. Heights, directed by Sidney Poitier. Despite the cast that featured Cicely Tyson, Diane Ladd, Louis Gossett Jr., and David Steinberg, the comedy lasted a week.
He came to Los Angeles when Neil Simon asked him to play a waiter on a train in The Out of Towners (1970). While in town, he met influential CBS casting director Ethel Vinant, "and by the time I got back to New York, I had a series"—The Leslie Uggs Show.
Brown was on Laugh-In for a year before he found out why he was hired for it. Davis "had dinner with [Dan] Rowan and [Dick] Martin," he recalled. "They were looking for new faces, and Sammy, without taking a look, said, 'Get Johnny Brown.'"
Brown was also a welcome scene in shows including Julia, Maude, The Rookies, Lotsa Luck!, The Jeffersons, Archie Bunker Place, Family Matters, Sister, Sister, Moonlighting and Martin, and in films such as The Wiz (1978), Poitiers Hanky Panki (1982), Life (1999) and Town and Country (2001).
He also pitched the Wright Brothers pens ("Write on brothers, write on!") in a series of music commercials for Papermate in the early 1970s and starred in The Gospel Truth, a country in the late '80s. Played across forums.