Ice-T

Tracy Marrow reached film through music, and the sequence matters. Signed to Sire in 1987 for Rhyme Pays, he founded Rhyme Syndicate Records the following year and released Power, then The Iceberg in 1989, O.G. Original Gangster in 1991 and Home Invasion in 1993. He worked in heavy metal alongside the rap records, and the Cop Killer furore turned him into a national political argument for a season.

Hollywood arrived in the middle of that and hired him mostly as himself. His first credits are the breakdance pictures Breakin' and its sequel in 1984, but New Jack City in 1991 is the one that reframed him: cast as Scotty Appleton, a cop, against type and against expectation, and he underplays the whole part while the film burns around him. Ricochet, Trespass, Surviving the Game and the cyberpunk pair Johnny Mnemonic and Tank Girl all followed within four years.

Then the bottom of the market absorbed him. Through the late nineties and early 2000s he made a long string of low-budget action pictures, Mean Guns, Crazy Six, Exiled, Stealth Fighter, Air Rage and Ticker among them, most shot fast and sold on his name alone.

Television rescued the career. As Odafin Tutuola on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit he has now played one character longer than most actors play anything, and the role suits his one great gift: an unhurried, flat delivery that makes a line of exposition sound like a warning. He also turns up constantly as himself in hip-hop documentaries, which has become its own second job.