Cleavon Little Biography

Cleavon Little was an American actor, best remembered for his role as a black sheriff in the Academy Award-nominated comedy movie ‘Blazing Saddles’. He was a trained actor who appeared regularly in films and television shows, mostly during the 1970s and 1980s. Thanks to his versatile and charismatic stage performances, he became the first black actor to win a ‘Tony Award’. In his lifetime, he appeared in more than two dozen plays. He was a scholarship student at the ‘American Academy of Dramatic Arts’ where he was first noticed in 1966 for his performance in a production of ‘Macbeth’. Initially, Cleavon’s screen career looked very promising and critics were expecting him to become a leading film actor, but his movie career did not quite live up to its full potential. His last major acting assignment was the television series ‘True Colors’, in which he starred as Ron Freeman for 11 episodes. His other notable performance was in the TV show ‘Baghdad Cafe’. He was last seen on TV screens in 1992, appearing in an episode of ‘Tales from the Crypt’. A year later, he died of colon cancer at the age of 53.