Whether he was reciting lines from a Shakespeare play or providing the voice of an animal in a motion picture, Roscoe Lee Browne’s talents had no limit.

An Emmy Award winner, Browne’s career spanned more than half a century and included nearly 200 film, television and stage credits.

The classically-trained actor, who was born the son of a Baptist minister in Woodbury, N.J., died Wednesday of cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 81.

Browne’s commanding presence and deep baritone voice were his trademarks. They were also traits that moved some of the most renowned Hollywood figures to pursue Browne for their projects. Throughout his career, Browne was directed by such luminaries as Sidney Poitier (“Uptown Saturday Night”), Alfred Hitchcock (“Topaz”) and Jules Dassin (“Up Tight!”).

“He was one of the most remarkable presences on stage, on film, on television,” Sidney Poitier who knew Browne for more the 40 years, told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday. “However, when he was in person, he was particularly impactful.”

Gifted in comedy as well as drama, Browne won his Emmy in 1986 for a guest appearance as Professor Foster in an episode of “The Cosby Show.” He was nominated for an Emmy a decade earlier for a performance on the 1970’s sitcom, “Barney Miller.”

On Broadway, he appeared in the 1960s as The Narrator in a Broadway production of "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe," a play by Edward Albee from a novella by Carson McCullers, and was nominated for a Tony for best supporting actor in 1992 for his role as Holloway in August Wilson's acclaimed play, “Two Trains Running.”

Mark Anthony Neal, an associate professor of black popular culture at Duke University, said Browne’s talents, like many black actors of his era, was often bigger than the vehicles in which he appeared. It’s unfortunate, Neal told BlackAmericaWeb.com, that some people may remember Browne more for being the man who replaced Robert Guillaume as the butler on the 1970s’ series “Soap” than for his dramatic work.

“He’s from a generation of black actors that worked in Negro ensemble and stage, but didn’t get real opportunities until appearing in blaxpoitation,” Neal said of Brown, who gave up a job selling wine for an import company in the 1950’s to pursue acting full time. His debut was as the Soothsayer in "Julius Caesar" in the New York Shakespeare Festival's inaugural season.

Neal said Browne’s diction is what stood out most about the actor, who graduate of Lincoln University who served in the U.S. Army in Italy during World War II. A gifted runner who won the 800-yard dash world championship in 1951, Browne also taught French and comparative literature at his alma mater.

“I just always assumed that he was British in the way that he carried himself,” Neal, author of "Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic and New Black Man -- Rethinking Black Masculinity," told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “He often complained that because he spoke so well, a lot of his critics didn’t think he was authentic.”

His distinguished demeanor was no front, and it often added to the roles Browne took on. One of his more memorable guest appearances on television came in a 1972 episode of “All in the Family” when, playing a snobbish attorney, he got stuck in an elevator with Archie Bunker and a pregnant woman.

When he wasn’t perfecting characters on the small screen, Browne was holding his own on the big screen. He played a Harlem drug dealer in “Superfly T.N.T.” and a rancher in “The Cowboys” with John Wayne. 

In 1966, he wrote and made his directorial stage debut with "A Hand Is on the Gate: An Evening of Negro Poetry and Folk Music," which starred Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones and Moses Gunn.

Over the years, he had steady work as a narrator of the documentaries, "The Ra Expeditions"; live-action family fare, "Babe" and "Babe: Pig in the City"; and the animated, "Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties."

His ability to keep working for such a long time is just one thing in which fans should respect about Browne, Neal said.

“If he had a legacy, it was the perseverance because he never stopped working,” Neal told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “Even if it was doing voiceovers, he was always doing it with that distinctive voice.”