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the death of Richard Roundtree is a loss, for sure. In retrospect, he deserved to have a much higher-profile career.  He should have been able to do the same types of projects as someone like Sean Connery, Harrison Ford or Michael Caine. In the 1980s he seemed to disappear, totally.  Virtually all of his peers in the black action-movie movement were abandoned by Hollywood by the Reagan era.  Richard Pryor managed to hang on with a series of increasingly rote comedies, and Eddie Murphy "took over" as the nod to diversity in action actors, though in Murphy's case, his characters tended not to do much besides flirt with the women he interacted with. The rise of VCRs and the (eventually dominant) VHS tape format led to an increased cult status for Roundtree as the  Shaft  films and others gradually became commercially available. By the early 1990s, he began appearing in guest roles on episodic television, like  Beverly Hills 90210  and  Fresh Prince o...