Vonetta McGee, an actress whose big-screen heyday during the blaxploitation era of the 1970s included leading roles in “Blacula” and “Shaft in Africa,” has died. She was 65.
McGee died Friday at a hospital in Berkeley, Calif., after experiencing cardiac arrest, said family spokeswoman Kelley Nayo.
McGee was described as “one of the busiest and most beautiful black actresses” by Los Angeles Times movie reviewer Kevin Thomas in 1972, the year she appeared opposite Fred Williamson in the black action movie “Hammer” and had starring roles in the crime drama “Melinda” and the horror film “Blacula.” She went on to appear with Richard Roundtree in “Shaft in Africa” (1973), and co-starred with Max Julien in “Thomasine & Bushrod” (1974).
McGee also starred with Clint Eastwood in the 1975 action thriller “The Eiger Sanction.”
“I was pleased to see her get a role with Clint Eastwood,” said Williamson, who knew McGee before they made “Hammer.” “Not many black actors had that opportunity to be in a movie where color doesn’t matter.”
McGee was no fan of the “blaxploitation” label that was attached to many of the films featuring black casts in the ’70s. That label, she told the Los Angeles Times in 1979, was used “like racism, so you don’t have to think of the individual elements, just the whole. If you study propaganda, you understand how this works.”
In the ’80s, her career turned primarily to television.
That included playing Sister Indigo on Robert Blake’s short-lived 1985 dramatic series “Hell Town” and playing a social worker who takes a con man played by Jimmie Walker into her home in the syndicated 1987-88 sitcom “Bustin’ Loose.” She also played a recurring role on “L.A. Law” and appeared in several episodes of “Cagney & Lacey” as the wife of detective Mark Petrie (played by Carl Lumbly).
McGee and Lumbly were married in 1986. She is survived by him and their son, Brandon; her mother; and four siblings.
