Delroy Lindo

Delroy LindoDelroy Lindo (born 18 November 1952) is a British-American actor. Lindo has been nominated for the Tony and Screen Actors Guild awards, and has won a Satellite Award. He is perhaps best known for his roles as West Indian Archie in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, Catlett in Get Shorty and Woody Carmichael in the Spike Lee film Crooklyn.
Lindo was born in Eltham, London, the son of Jamaican immigrant parents, and raised in Lewisham, England. His mother was a nurse and his father worked in various jobs. At five years of age he appeared in a few Nativity plays. As a teenager, he and his mother moved to Toronto, Canada, and when he was sixteen, they moved Delroy Lindoto San Francisco, where Lindo would graduate from the American Conservatory Theater.
Lindo’s movie debut came in 1976 with the British comedy Find the Lady, followed by two other roles in films such as that of an Army sergeant in More American Graffiti (1979), when he quit acting for 10 years to concentrate on theatre production. In 1982, he debuted on Broadway in Master Harold and the Boys directed by the play’s author Athol Fugard and by 1988, Lindo earned a Tony nomination for his portrayal of Herald Loomis in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.
It was director Spike Lee who provided the boost Lindo’s career needed, even though he had turned down a role in Do the Right Thing to act alongside Rutger Hauer and Joan Chen in the cult sci-fi movie Salute of the Jugger (1990), and cast him as Woody Carmichael in the drama Crooklyn (1994). Other films he has starred in are Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty, Clockers, Ransom, and as the baseball player Satchel Paige in Soul of the Game (1996). Much of the character actor’s work alternates between playing treacherous bad guys or Delroy Lindotrustworthy professionals. He continues to work on screen, most recently on the short lived NBC drama Kidnapped.
He guest-starred on The Simpsons in the episode Brawl in the Family, playing a character named Gabriel that appears very similar to his character in A Life Less Ordinary (where Dan Hedaya played the angel Gabriel, and Lindo’s boss). Homer believes Gabriel is an angel, which he repeatedly denies.
In the Fall of 2008, Lindo directed August Wilson’s play “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in Berkeley, California. Lindo’s association with Berkeley Rep began in 2007, when he directed Tanya Barfield’s play, The Blue Door.