Jihmi Kennedy

Perhaps there's something in the old adage about the smell of the greasepaint. In the early 1990s, Jihmi Kennedy quit acting and returned to teach in his home town of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. However, a decade later, he returned to the boards and resumed a career that had started in the mid-1980s with a trio of different roles opposite Edward Woodward as the eponymous troubleshooter in the CBS crime show "The Equalizer." Kennedy made his feature bow as Junior opposite Michael Keaton in Ron Howard's 1986 US-Japanese culture clash satire "Gung Ho" and, following an episode of "Spenser: For Hire," he played Officer Knight in the Elmore Leonard-scripted whodunit "The Rosary Murders," and Walkman in the haunted prison chiller "The Chair." However, 1989 proved to be Kennedy's landmark year. Having appeared as The Wiz in Robby Benson's drug drama "White Hot," he played a scam artist in the Ricki Lake teleplay "Babycakes" and reunited with Keaton as the tow man in Howard Zieff's lunatics on the loose romp "The Dream Team." But the standout role was in Edward Zwick's "Glory," as Private Jupiter Sharts, a freeman who fights in the Civil War with the first all-black regiment, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Yet, after a brief stint as Shakey Williams in the Vietnam War series "Tour of Duty," Kennedy retired from acting, only to make a small-screen comeback in the early 2000s in "Crossing Jordan" and "Soul Food" before playing Beetle in the 2007 short, "The Lives of Angels."