There is probably no greater achievement in Hollywood than being inducted into the very exclusive list of EGOT winners. An EGOT-status artist is one who has had the distinct honor of winning at least one Emmy, one Grammy, one Oscar and one Tony award. The most recent EGOTs include John Legend, Whoopi Goldberg and James Earl Jones.

American rapper and actor Mos Def never managed to achieve EGOT status, although no one could say that it was for want of trying. The 47-year old can at least boast of having gotten halfway on the path to getting halfway there: he is a multiple time Grammy-nominated artist, and he also has one Emmy nomination to his name.

Mos Def announced his retirement from acting and singing in 2016. His legacy lies in the latter more than the earlier, but here is a look at how his acting career spanned out.

Caught The Bug

Born Dante Terrell Smith in December 1973, the New Yorker took an interest in the arts from a relatively young age. He started dabbling in acting while he was still in middle school.

"I was in my first play, Free to Be…You and Me when I was in fifth grade," he told SPIN magazine in 2009. "I just caught the bug, and the magnet schools around my way had talent programs, and my mother was keen on getting me into them. And Philippa Schuyler, my middle school, was this place, this oasis, in Brooklyn, in Bushwick, in the hood, but there were all these bright, talented kids. It was like the Huxtables years before The Cosby Show."

Yung-Mos-Def-1
via: Hip Hop Golden Age

Despite this passion for acting, it was in music where Mos Def really started to make his name in showbiz. In the '90s, he was part of two groups, first Urban Thermo Dynamics (UTD), and then later Black Star with fellow rapper Talib Kweli. He then followed this up with a solo career, in the course of which he bagged his six Grammy nominations.

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Biggest Movie Role

Mos Def's first foray into professional acting came in 1997, as he made a cameo in a Michael Jackson short film that was titled Ghosts. The screenplay was written by horror maestro Stephen King. He continued to feature in different movies in the years that followed, including as a mechanic in the 2001 cult classic, Monster's Ball starring Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton.

Mos Def would land his biggest movie role about three years later, when he was cast in the HBO film, Something the Lord Made. Based on true events, the picture told the story of Vivien Thomas, a black man hired to work as a janitor at Vanderbilt University in the 1930s. However, Thomas quickly rose to become an assistant to Dr. Alfred Blalock, who had hired him.

Mos Def portrayed Vivien Thomas, while Dr. Blalock was played by Alan Rickman. Out of the nine Emmy Award nominations the film got (winning three), one went to Mos Def for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie. He was also nominated for a Golden Globe for the role, although he eventually lost out to Geoffrey Rush in the category.

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Retired From Music And Acting

Mos Def would go on to star in various films and television shows for the decade or so that followed. One of these credits was in the serial killer drama, Dexter on Showtime, where he featured in a total of five episodes. Around the same time, he also retired the name 'Mos Def', as was reported by Rolling Stone.

Something The Lord Made
via: Binged

He changed his legal name to Yasiin Bey, and took it on as his stage name as well. In January 2016, he was arrested in South Africa for reportedly using a fake passport. The rapper had frequented the country on work as well as personal trips before, and even spoken about his love for it.

"I came and I said I'm not leaving," Mos Def had told a local paper. "I'm staying. It's a beautiful place. It has the ocean, mountain, botanical gardens and beautiful people." During a 'takeover' of Kanye West's website, he made a post insisting that he had not broken the law.

In the same post, he announced that he would be retiring from music and acting. "I'm retiring from the music recording industry as it is currently assembled today, and also Hollywood, effective immediately," he wrote. "I'm releasing my final album this year, and that's that."

The Brooklyn-born artist did end up releasing another album in 2019. However, he has stayed true to his word and not featured in another film since his 2013 cameo in Life of Crime.

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