Most of these were in his fifties, seventies and seventies, and film and TV producers called on him again and again to breathe a rumpled, jaded soul into small but crucial roles.
Cobbs has appeared on such television shows as “The Sopranos,” “The West Wing,” “Sesame Street” and “Good Times.” He also played Whitney Houston’s manager in “The Bodyguard,” the mysterious watch man in the Coen brothers’ “The Hudsucker Proxy” and a doctor in John Sayles’ “The Sunshine State” (2002). He played a coach in “Air Bud” (1997), a security guard in “Night at the Museum” and a father on the television series “The Gregory Hines Show” from 1997 to 1999.
Cobbs rarely had the opportunity to play prominent, award-winning roles. Instead, he was a relatable, memorable, everyday person who made an impression on audiences regardless of his time on screen. In 2020, he won a Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Limited Performance in a Daytime Program for the series “Dino Dana.”
Wendell Pierce, who worked with Cobbs on the TV dramas “I’ll Fly Away” and “The Gregory Hines Show,” which aired from 1991 to 1993, wrote on the social media platform X that he remembered Cobbs as “a father figure, a griot and an iconic artist who lived his life as an actor.”
Wilbert Francisco Cobbs was born in Cleveland on June 16, 1934.
After graduating from high school, Cobbs served in the United States Air Force for eight years. After his military service, he worked in car sales for a few years until a customer asked him if he’d like to appear in a play. Cobbs’ first stage appearance was in 1969.
He began acting in theaters in Cleveland and later moved to New York, where he joined the Negro Ensemble Company and performed with Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee.
Cobbs later said that acting resonated with him as a way to express the human condition, especially during the civil rights era of the late 1960s.
“To be an artist, you have to have a sense of giving,” Cobbs said in a 2004 interview. “Art is, in a way, like prayer. We respond to what we see around us, what we feel, how things affect us mentally and spiritually.”
