Actor Johnny Lee Davenport uttered one of the most Chicago of lines about a Chicago icon in one of the most Chicago of movies.
It happened when Deputy U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerard — Tommy Lee Jones — eavesdrops on a wiretap as he tries to track “The Fugitive” — Dr. Richard Kimble, played by Harrison Ford.
Gerard and other deputies lean in to monitor Kimble’s call to his lawyer. Kimble says he’s calling from St. Louis. The rumble of a train is heard.
And Mr. Davenport, playing Marshal Henry, cracks the case.
“I might be crazy,” he says, “but that train sounds like an El.”
Tommy Lee Jones’s character scoffed: “Then you can explain the difference in the sound of an elevated train as opposed to a train that’s running along the ground. You must have ears like an eagle.”
As they fine-tune the recording, they hear a CTA announcement: “Next stop, Merchandise Mart.”
“Son of a bitch,” Jones marvels about Kimble. “Our boy came home.”
Mr. Davenport, who did everything from that 1993 film to “Law and Order” to “Empire” to Shakespeare, died Sunday at 69, according to friends and associates in the Boston area, where he was living. He had leukemia, said Michael J. Bobbitt, who received word of the death from Mr. Davenport’s wife, Kelly Cook.
Mr. Davenport performed on many Chicago stages. And he’d been planning to appear as Troy Maxson in August Wilson’s “Fences” this year at New Repertory Theatre, said Bobbitt, artistic director of the Watertown, Massachusetts, company.
“It’s a loss for Chicago, Boston and just everyone,” said Maurice Emmanuel Parent, executive director of the Front Porch Arts Collective, a black theater company in Boston.
“While he was able to maintain a lot of authority, he was also an incredibly likable presence on the screen,” said Dawn Gray of Chicago’s Gray Talent Group, which represented Mr. Davenport.
In the 1990s, he appeared in “Everyman” and “Nomathemba” at Steppenwolf Theatre; “Miss Julie” and “Comedians” at Court Theatre, and, at the Goodman Theatre, “Cry, the Beloved Country” and “I Am a Man.”
“He would tell stories about performing in Chicago and how much he loved it there,” Parent said.
Chicago-area audiences also saw him in many works of Shakespeare including “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Othello.”
“He had a lifetime goal of doing every play that Shakespeare ever wrote. ... I think he was only two or three plays short,” said Kieran Campion, a theater agent at the Gray Talent Group.
In recent years, Mr. Davenport took a one-man show around the country, “Marshall,” about Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Supreme Court justice. “That has been his calling card for the last decade or so,” said Campion.
Mr. Davenport’s Facebook page said he said he was from Shreveport, Louisiana, and that he studied at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.
“He was one of the earliest champions of our work,” said Dawn Meredith Simmons, artistic director of the Front Porch Arts Collective. He originated the role of Great Grand Daddy Deus, a Zeus-like, Afro-centric deity, in a 2019 co-production of “black odyssey boston”by the Front Porch Arts Collective and Underground Railway Theater.
“Right from the beginning, we knew he was the lead,” Simmons said. His voice was “unmistakable — it is decades of power and training. ... It is commanding and can stop you in your tracks.”
Mr. Davenport also was an approachable, generous mentor to fledgling actors. He tutored them on monologues from Shakespeare and the Greek classics. “He taught them to understand what they were actually saying,” Simmons said. “You could see the difference when those students went into an audition.”
In the movies, Mr. Davenport also appeared in “Chain Reaction” and “Ted.” He starred with with Robert De Niro and Jennifer Lawrence in “Joy” and with Gene Hackman in “The Package.”
More recently, he portrayed Harold in Showtime’s “Work in Progress,” Gray said.
His trademark expression, Parent said, was “I’ll keep a good thought for you.”
Contributing: Lee Bey
