Ted Ross
Theodore Ross Roberts worked as Ted Ross, and one role defined him twice. He played the Lion in The Wiz, the all-Black reinterpretation of The Wizard of Oz, first in the original 1975 Broadway production, which won him a Tony, and then in the 1978 film alongside Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Richard Pryor, Nipsey Russell and Lena Horne.
The film career that followed put him in supporting parts, and he was very good at a specific one: the working man being paid to be patient with rich or foolish people. He is Bitterman, Arthur's chauffeur, in Arthur and again seven years later in Arthur 2: On the Rocks, a performance built almost entirely out of what he declines to say while a millionaire talks. Captain Reed in Police Academy, the lawyer in Ragtime, Mr. Booth in Amityville II: The Possession and Bud Scott in Stealing Home run on the same engine, weight and calm in a frame full of noise.
Television took much of the rest. He appeared on Benson, The Jeffersons, What's Happening Now!!, The Cosby Show and its spin-off A Different World, none of which are among the credits listed here. His last screen part, in 1991, is small and oddly fitting: the Limo Bum in The Fisher King, a man standing beside a limousine ten years after he was hired to drive one.
Movies (8)
Where to start with Ted Ross
Begin with The Wiz. The film has always divided people, but the Lion is the part he built on stage and then got to keep, and his version of cowardice is played as exhaustion rather than slapstick, which is a harder and better choice.
After that, Arthur is the essential one. Bitterman is barely written, and Ross turns him into the film's only sane adult, so the sequel Arthur 2: On the Rocks is worth it purely to watch him do the job again with less to work with. Police Academy gives him authority and a straight face inside a very silly comedy, Ragtime uses him seriously, and The Fisher King is a single-scene farewell that lands harder if you have seen the Arthur films first.