I suppose it’s not terribly surprising that, sometimes, you fail to connect two roles an actor has done more than a decade apart as being by the same person, especially when they’re radically different parts. It happens. Sometimes, though, it makes you wish that other people had taken a little more notice of the person’s talents and brought them to wider attention.

So it was with Bill Nunn. It was only when I started seeing the announcements of his death that I realized that Radio Raheem of Do the Right Thing and Robbie Robertson of the Raimi Spider-Man movies were played by the same man. Who was also Eddie Souther, the detective protecting Whoopie Goldberg in Sister Act, which I’ll confess to having watched more recently than either of them. In all, he made over forty movies and appeared on nearly thirty TV shows.

Nunn is actually one of a long line of people associated with football in his family; his grandfather was the first black player for George Westinghouse High School in Pittsburgh. His father was an NFL scout. He was a ball boy for the Pittsburgh Steelers—and, with a fellow ball boy who is now president of the organization, stole Mean Joe Green’s car and took it for a joyride once. However, Nunn did not choose to make a career of football and instead determinedly went into acting.

His first few roles were for Spike Lee, and as far as I can tell, the pair met at Morehouse. Certainly both of them attended the college. He played a wide range of characters over the years, never falling into typecasting yet never drawing on the level of fame his acclaim from Do the Right Thing might have suggested would happen.

In a year of gut-punching celebrity deaths, perhaps Nunn might slip under the radar as he did for much of his career. However, he seems to have been a genuinely nice guy and a quiet talent, and there’s room, I think, for more of those than for world-changing types. Honestly, I can see him doing some of the roles Alan Rickman did. Not in the same way, of course; they were very different actors. Nunn was, I think, better at portraying likeable guys even though not all of his characters fit that. I could still wish more notice for him than I think he will have.