Michael Wright, who starred in the films as The Five Heartbeats, The Principal and Sugar Hill, as well as the TV series V, has died.
The actor’s wife, Susan Wright, announced the actor’s death in a statement on Instagram. “It is with profound sadness and an unimaginable heaviness in my heart that I share the passing of my beloved husband, Michael Wright.”
Family members told TMZ in a statement that Wright died on Wednesday of heart failure and complications of Marchiafava-Bignami, which is a rare degenerative neurological disease. He was 70.
“Many knew and loved him through ‘The Five Heartbeats,’ ‘The Wanderers,’ ‘V,’ ‘The Principal,’ ‘Streamers,’ and the many other characters he brought to life throughout his remarkable career,” Susan Wright further wrote on Instagram. “His talent, presence, and contributions to film and television will live on, but to those of us who loved him personally, he was so much more than the roles the world knew him for.”
Directed by Robert Townshend from a screenplay by Townshend and Keenan Ivory Wayans, 1991’s The Five Heartbeats chronicled the fictional singing group of the same name. Wright plays Eddie King Jr., the group’s talented but troubled lead singer.
In V, which began as a miniseries on NBC in 1983 but became a regular series in 1984, Wright played Elias Taylor, one of the leaders of the Resistance after the First Invasion of aliens called the Visitors on Earth.
In 1987’s The Principal, Wright starred opposite Jim Belushi and Louis Gossett Jr. as Victor Duncan, a gang leader and drug dealer at odds with Belushi’s high school principal Rick Lattimer.
Wright also starred opposite Wesley Snipes in the 1994 crime drama Sugar Hill, where he and Snipes played as brothers Raynathan and Roemello Skuggs, a pair of drug dealers in Harlem.
Michael Wright Had More Than 70 Screen Roles
Born April 30, 1956, in New York City, Michael Wright’s screen debut was in director Phillip Kaufman’s 1979 crime drama The Wanderers, where he played a supporting role opposite Ken Wahl and Karen Allen.
Following his turn in the TV movies Fighting Back (1981), Dream House (1981) and Benny’s Place (1982), Wright landed the pivotal role of Elias Taylor in the V miniseries in 1983.
In 1984, Wright starred as Carlyle in director Robert Altman’s war drama Streamers, which chroniciles the friction between four young soldiers awaiting deployment to Vietnam in 1965.
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