Louis Gossett Jr. Plays a Musician With Alzheimer's in New Film

Louis Gossett Jr. has come a long way since his first day in L.A. in 1966, when cops handcuffed him to a tree for three hours because he looked suspicious. He became a star of 1977's Roots, which beat Gone With the Wind's record for TV viewership, and was the first Black American to win the best supporting actor Oscar, for An Officer and a Gentleman (1982). In his new film, The Cuban (streaming here), Gossett plays a former Havana jazzman with Alzheimer's whose nurse (Ana Golja) revives his mind through music.

See what the multifaceted Gossett has to say about music, memory and movies, writing the first song performed at Woodstock, and his activism to combat racism, in his conversation with AARP.

Viewers might think The Cuban is sentimental or far-fetched to suggest that music can affect the brains of Alzheimer's patients. But AARP research indicates that music offers healing power for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease and stroke.

Gossett: It can affect more than Alzheimer's patients; it can affect babies. My son was born with a fever, so I played some music so he could get a good night's sleep: Miles Davis and Nina Simone. He stopped for a minute, then went back to crying. Finally I played Erik Satie's Trois Gymnopédies and he went to sleep. That's why my son's name is Satie. So music does soothe the savage beast. Music is the healing sound.

Your performance gets us into the head of the Cuban hero — his dementia experience, his reawakening and his beautiful memories of being young and in love in Havana before communism. You sing in the film — did you start as a musician?

Folk music paid the rent. In 1960 and ‘61, I ran a Greenwich Village hootenanny with Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul and Mary. Bobby Zimmerman came through there — now he's Bob Dylan — and Judy Collins, Joan Baez and Mama Cass. I wrote the first song performed at the Woodstock festival, by Richie Havens:

Hey, look yonder, tell me what's that you see
Marching to the fields of Concord?
Looks like Handsome Johnny with his flintlock in his hand,
Marching to the Concord war.

I also did a musical with Sammy Davis Jr., Golden Boy, and sang in The Zulu and the Zayda on Broadway.

You were also almost a pro basketball player, right?

I tried out for the [New York] Knicks in 1959-60. But also at the same time I got a part in A Raisin in the Sun with Sidney Poitier.

RELATED: Read all about the 50th anniversary of the landmark film A Raisin in the Sun.