Delroy Lindo

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Delroy Lindo

Delroy Lindo (born November 18, 1952, Eltham, London, England, UK) is a British born, American actor.

The son of Jamaican immigrant parents, Lindo was born and raised in Lewisham, England, where at age 5 on the strength of the nativity plays he appeared in became a stage actor. As a teenager he and his mother moved to Toronto, Canada and by the 1970s they had moved to the U.S. where Lindo would graduate from the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. His 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 Harald 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 comedy Crooklyn (1994). Among the films he has starred in have been Barry Sonnenfeld's Get Shorty, Clockers, Feeling Minnesota, 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 trustworthy professionals. He continues to work on screen, most recently on the short lived NBC drama Kidnapped.