Howard Rollins Jr
Elisa Leonelli
Howard Rollins Jr. was born on October 17th, 1950.
His film debut in 1981’s Ragtime earned him Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actor as well as a nominator for the latter’s New Star of the Year award.
In 1982, he received a Daytime Emmy nomination for his role playing Ed Harding on the soap opera, Another World.
He played Medgar Evans in the TV movie, For Us the Living: The Medgar Evers Story, earning a NAACP Image Award nomination in 1983.
In 1988, he started playing the lead role of Detective Virgil Tibbs on the NBC TV show, In the Heat of the Night.
He was arrested several times as a result of his struggle with an addiction to drugs and alcohol during his time on the the show.
During season 3 of In the Heat of the Night, he took six weeks off to seek treatment in rehab.
By the end of season 6 of the show, Howard had three outstanding warrants against him and was fired.
After becoming sober, he would occasionally return to guest star during season 7.
He appeared in the 1992 TV movie, With Murder in Mind, made a guest appearance in 1995 on New York Undercover, and in 1996 on Remember WENN.
His final film role was in the 1996 TV movie, Harambee!
In the fall of 1996, was diagnosed with AIDS.
Six weeks later, Howards Rollins Jr. died of a bacterial infection caused by complications of lymphoma on December 8th, 1996. He was 46 years old.
After his death, his “friends” and neighbors revealed to a tabloid that for years he led a secret life dressing up in women’s clothes, frequenting gay bars and looking to pick up men while dressed as his drag persona, “Tooraloora Goldfarb.”
According to them, towards the end of his life, he only found comfort in dressing up as his drag persona.
His “friends” had alleged in the tabloid that he joked to them that he wanted to be buried as a woman “in a gold and black beaded cocktail dress, with makeup and false eyelashes.”