Sad news today: actor Robert Guillaume, who voiced Rafiki in The Lion King, has died age 89.
His wife, Donna Brown Guillaume, said he died due to complications due to prostate cancer, which he’d had for 25 years.
Guillaume had a long and incredible career, winning multiple Emmy Awards for playing the wisecracking butler Benson DuBois in both Soap and its spinoff, Benson. His early years growing up in poverty and working odd jobs helped formulate his most famous character.
But for a younger generation, Guillaume will be familiar as the voice of the baboon Rafiki in The Lion King, later also winning a Grammy Award in 1995 for best spoken word album for children for his narration on The Lion King Read Along.
His portrayal of a Benson DuBois, a black domestic worker in a white household, was criticised at times, but Benson always spoke of his character fondly, and commented on his several times in later interviews.
“I had reservations, because you’re serving food, you’re serving the family and all that sort of thing … It’s like nothing has changed since the 1800s,” he told Oprah in 2016.
“[But] the minute I saw the script, I knew I had a live one,” he told the Associated Press in 2001. “Every role was written against type, especially Benson, who wasn’t subservient to anyone. To me, Benson was the revenge for all those stereotyped guys who looked like Benson in the ‘40s and ‘50s (movies) and had to keep their mouths shut.”
And in his 2002 autobiography, Guillaume: A Life, he wrote: “I wanted black people to be proud of Benson.”
RIP.
