Michael Wright, who starred as the lead vocalist Eddie King Jr. in Robert Townsend’s The Five Heartbeats and as Wesley Snipes’ brother in Sugar Hill, has died. He was 70.
Wright died Wednesday in Los Angeles of heart failure and complications from Marchiafava-Bignami disease, a rare degenerative neurological disorder, TMZ reported.
“Our family is grieving an enormous and deeply personal loss,” his wife, Susan, wrote on Instagram. “Michael, your work will live forever, but your love will live even longer in the hearts of those who knew you best. Rest peacefully, my love. You will be missed beyond words.”
The lanky Wright also stood out as the Resistance fighter Elias Taylor on the popular NBC miniseries and series V in the mid-1980s and as the drug-addled inmate Omar White on 22 episodes of HBO’s Oz over three seasons from 2001-03.
In The Five Heartbeats (1991), written by Townsend and Keenen Ivory Wayans, Wright sparkled as the leader of the Motown-inspired R&B group that struggles to deal with success over the years (his King character battled drugs and alcohol). The group also featured Townsend as Duck Matthews, Tico Wells as Anthony “Choirboy” Stone, Leon as J.T. Matthews and Harry J. Lennix as Terrence “Dresser” Williams.
Wright was excellent again as Raynathan Skuggs, brother of Snipes’ Roemello Skuggs, in the gritty Sugar Hill (1994), written by Barry Michael Cooper in the second film of his “Harlem Trilogy.”
From left: Leon, Robert Townsend, Tico Wells, Harry J. Lennix and Michael Wright in ‘The Five Heartbeats.’
20th Century Fox Film / courtesy Everett Collection
Wright was born in New York City on April 30, 1956. His mother, Alberta, owned Jezebel, a Southern restaurant in the theater district, and that’s where he met Townsend for the first time.
“I never go out,” Townsend told New York magazine in 1991. “But before I knew it, we were club-hopping. Then we ended up in Michael’s apartment at 3 a.m. watching this Japanese film [Bedtime Lies] he’d made.”
Wright had started out in a work study program at the Lee Strasberg Institute, where he “mopped floors, I answered phones, I did all kinds of tasks in exchange for my classes,” he told Sheen magazine in a 2021 interview.
He then appeared in his first film as Clinton, the leader of The Del Bombers gang, in The Wanderers (1979), directed by Philip Kaufman, followed by a turn as a volatile young soldier named Carlyle in Robert Altman’s Streamers (1983).
Six months after their first meeting, Townsend sent him the script for The Five Heartbeats for the role that had been designed with Denzel Washington in mind.
He noted that after Cooper had written the part of Raynathan for him in Sugar Hill, he was sitting in a coffee shop in Manhattan when Snipes walked in “with an entourage of about 10 people.”
“I just stood up and got him by the lapels and said, ‘Man, I got a movie and I want you to make it with me,’” he said. “He wanted me to tell him more about it. We got in his limo. Wesley had a three-picture deal with Fox, I think. I got Wes to commit to making that film. That’s how that film got made.
“That was an authentic New York role, and it was made for me. A lot of it was commiserate with my own personal journey. I improvised the whole film.”
Wright’s résumé also included the films The Principal (1987), Money Talks (1997), Piñero (2001), The Interpreter (2005) and Dope King (2025) and the TV series Miami Vice, New York Undercover and Black Lightning.
Survivors include five children and a grandchild.
“The greatest sin an actor can commit is to fail to be interesting,” he said in his Sheen interview. “I always try to make my characters interesting. I want you to be riveted and wonder what’s going on behind my eyes. I want the audience to think along with me and go on an internal journey.”