Christopher St. John, sometimes credited as Chris St. John, is an American film and

television Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertisin ...

actor An actor or actress is a person who portrays a character in a performance. The actor performs "in the flesh" in the traditional medium of the theatre or in modern media such as film, radio, and television. The analogous Greek term is (), li ...

. He is also a film producer, film director and screenwriter and played a minor role in the television series ''

Remington Steele ''Remington Steele'' is an American television series co-created by Robert Butler and Michael Gleason. The series, starring Stephanie Zimbalist and Pierce Brosnan, was produced by MTM Enterprises and first broadcast on the NBC network from O ...

''.

Career

A member of

the Actors Studio The Actors Studio is a membership organization for professional actors, theatre directors and playwrights at 432 West 44th Street between Ninth and Tenth avenues in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded ...

starting in the mid-1960s, St. John is best known for playing the role of Ben Buford in the 1971 blaxploitation film '' Shaft''. Between 1968 and 1988, he appeared in eight film and television productions. In addition to appearing as George Lattimer in ''

Top of the Heap ''Top of the Heap'' is an American sitcom that ran for seven episodes on Fox from April 7 until May 19, 1991, the most successful of three attempted spin-offs of '' Married... with Children'' (the other two being '' Radio Free Trumaine'' and '' ...

'' (1972), St. John wrote, directed, and produced the film. It was entered into the

22nd Berlin International Film Festival The 22nd annual Berlin International Film Festival was held from 23 June to 4 July 1972. The Golden Bear was awarded to the Italian film '' I racconti di Canterbury'' directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Jury The following people were announced as ...

and was nominated for the Golden Bear, the festival's biggest prize. Richard Brody in ''The New Yorker'' described the film as a "crucial work of Afrofuturism." In 2014, the documentary film that St. John began in 1980, ''A Man Called God'', debuted at the San Diego Black Film Festival. The film was co-directed with his son

Kristoff St. John Kristoff St. John (July 15, 1966 – February 3, 2019) was an American actor best known for playing Neil Winters on the CBS daytime soap opera ''The Young and the Restless'' from 1991 until his death in 2019, which earned him two Daytime Emmy A ...

Personal life

He had one son, actor

, who died on February 3, 2019.

References

External links

* Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American male film actors African-American film directors American film directors African-American screenwriters American screenwriters American film producers African-American male actors American male television actors English-language film directors 21st-century African-American people {{US-screen-actor-stub