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Dutton was born the second of three children on January 30, 1951, in Baltimore, Maryland. He and his family lived in a public housing project just south of the Maryland Penitentiary, one of the toughest prisons in the nation. “I could see it from my bedroom,” Dutton recalled in USA Today. “In my neighborhood, more guys went to prison than school.” The product of a broken home, Dutton grew up strong and aggressive. Even his nickname bore evidence of the trouble to come. “When I was a kid, we had rock fights,” he explained in the Chicago Tribune. As a result, the guys started calling me `Rockhead.’ Somewhere along the line, the `k’ and the `head’ got dropped and it’s been Roc ever since.”

Charles S. Dutton liked to joke that he went “from jail to Yale.” He is certainly the only star of a television series who ever did hard time in a state penitentiary, the only artist to jump from the meanest streets in Baltimore to a prestigious Ivy League drama school, and from there to stardom on stage and screen. Dutton is best known as the character Roc on the FOX Network television show of the same name. He has also received some of the best roles available to African American actors in stage plays by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author August Wilson.

Convicted of manslaughter, he was sent to the penitentiary in 1967 but released on parole in less than two years.

Charles Dutton attended the Yale School of Drama, and in 1983 he first appeared off-Broadway in Richard III. Before long he was delivering Tony-calibre performances in such Broadway productions as Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and The Piano Lesson. In films since 1986’s No Mercy, the forceful, thunder-voiced Dutton has been seen in movies ranging from the mirth-provoking Crocodile Dundee 2 to the spine-chilling Alien 3. In 1991, Charles Dutton began a long TV run as the star of the Fox Network sitcom Roc.

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