Robert Guillaume

Robert Guillaume, who dreamed of being the first black tenor to sing at the Metropolitan Opera but settled for acting onstage and on television — and won Emmy Awards for playing the same character on two different ABC series — died on Tuesday October 24 2017 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 89. His wife, Donna Brown Guillaume, said the cause was complications of prostate cancer, which he had had for 25 years. Mr. Guillaume’s most well-known character was Benson DuBois, who began as a caustic butler on the sitcom “Soap,” which ran from 1977 to 1981, and later worked for, and eventually campaigned against, the governor of an unspecified state on the spinoff “Benson” (1979-86). Mr. Guillaume went on to play an executive producer, Isaac Jaffe, on Aaron Sorkin’s “Sports Night” (1998-2000), a sitcom about the inner workings of a show much like ESPN’s “SportsCenter.” When Mr. Guillaume had a stroke in 1999, Mr. Sorkin wrote a stroke into the script for the character so that he could continue playing the part. Mr. Guillaume was born Robert Peter Williams on Nov. 30, 1927, in St. Louis. His mother, Zoe Bertha Edwards, was an alcoholic and a prostitute. He never knew his father. His grandmother Jeanette Williams reared him after a stepfather struck him in the head with a red-hot poker. Robert attended a Roman Catholic high school, where he sang in the choir. He joined the Army in 1945, but the war was over by the time he reached Okinawa in the Pacific. He was honorably discharged in 1947. After the war he enrolled at St. Louis University to study business on the G.I. Bill. He later studied singing and theater at Washington University in St. Louis but never earned a degree. He married Marlene Scott in 1955. They separated but remained married for nearly three decades before divorcing in the mid-1980s. He married Donna Brown in 1985. He is also survived by three daughters, Patricia Carpenter and Melissa and Rachel Guillaume; one son, Kevin; four grandchildren; five great-grandchildren; and one great-great-granddaughter.