Kene Holliday
Kene Holliday is an actor, born 1949.
Kene Holliday came up in an era when a Black actor on American network television was usually cast as the professional in the uniform, and he made rather more of that than the writing generally allowed. On Carter Country, from 1977 to 1979, he was Sgt. Curtis Baker, the competent deputy in a Southern police department sitcom. On Matlock he was Tyler Hudson, Ben Matlock's original investigator, and the early run works partly on the division of labour: star lawyer in the courtroom, Hudson everywhere the lawyer will not go.
There is a second career running alongside the live-action one, and a lot of people know it without knowing him. He voiced Roadblock across G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero and its features, the heavy gunner who talks in rhyme. That is a cartoon part which lives or dies entirely on delivery, and his is unhurried and amused rather than barked.
The most interesting entry is not among the credits listed here. Great World of Sound, a small independent film, earned him an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Supporting Male, arriving decades after the network work and from a completely different direction.
Movies (4)
TV (8)
Where to start with Kene Holliday
Go to Matlock, and specifically the earlier episodes with Tyler Hudson in them, since the investigator role was recast later and the chemistry afterwards is not the same. Holliday plays Hudson as a man with his own opinion of the case, which the format did not require of him.
If you would rather hear him than watch him, G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero is a straight shot of the Roadblock voice and G.I. Joe: The Movie is the concentrated version. Carter Country is the historical curiosity, a late-1970s sitcom about a Southern police force that is exactly as uncomfortable in places as that sounds, and he is the best thing in it. Everybody's Fine is the small late appearance, playing a butcher, quietly done. The Philadelphia Experiment is the science-fiction oddity of the group, and The Wayans Bros. is there for anyone on a 1990s sitcom sweep.