Profile : Paternal Instincts : FOR LOUIS GOSSETT JR., EDUCATING AUDIENCES IS JUST AS IMPORTANT AS ENTERTAINING

Oscar and Emmy winner Louis Gossett Jr. believes actors “have a responsibility” to entertain and to educate.

Especially when it comes to dramas dealing with families. “This generation needs attention,” says Gossett, the father of two teen-age sons.

The actor (“Roots,” “An Officer and a Gentleman”) was thrilled with the reaction to his 1993 TV movie on NBC, ‘Father & Son: Dangerous Relations,” in which he was the star and executive producer. Gossett played an ex-con father who finally takes on the responsibility of being a father to the gangbanger son (Blair Underwood) he had abandoned as a baby.

“I got a great deal of response,” says the friendly, soft-spoken actor. “I got a lot of letters saying it was right on.” The letters were not from teen-age boys, he says, but from the missing fathers. “They felt guilt and they (said in the letters they) would try to reassume their responsibility.”

Gossett hopes to get a similar response from families with his latest TV movie, “A Father for Charlie,” airing Sunday on CBS. Again, Gossett is the executive producer.

In the heartwarming film, Gossett plays Walter Osgood, the only African American farmer in an Ozark town in Depression-era 1932. Seven years earlier, the Ku Klux Klan had killed his wife and young son and had driven out or killed the remaining African Americans in town. Osgood refuses to leave because his wife is buried at the farm; he also harbors hopes that his son is still alive and will return.

However, after a white, racist sharecropper (Don Swayze) burns his entire crop, Osgood is faced with losing the farm. In the middle of his troubles, Osgood finds himself drawn to taking care of 10-year-old Charlie (Joseph Mazzello), the abandoned son of the racist sharecropper. Charlie is just as racist as his father, and when the tables are turned andCharlie faces having to care for Osgood, racial barriers are broken. Osgood becomes the father Charlie has been yearning for all his life.

Gossett is “highly impressed” with his young co-star, Mazzello, who also starred in “Jurassic Park” and “Shadowlands.”

“He was able to do those (emotional) scenes and as soon as they said, ‘Cut,’ he would jump in his dad’s arms and play,” he says with obvious real affection. “He was incredible.”

Besides exploring relationships and how love transcends prejudice, Gossett says, “Father for Charlie” also dramatizes what happened to African Americans in the South during the Depression. “It kind of explains how the (modern-day) KKK got started,” he says. “There was not enough (work) to go around so people would say, ‘We got to keep this to ourselves.’ ”

It even happened to his own family. His grand uncle on his mother’s side was one of the biggest watermelon distributors in Georgia, Gossett says. “Me and my cousins worked (on the farm) during the summer,” he recalls. “His wife really never went to school. She didn’t know anything about reading or writing. When he died, one day the sheriff showed up with the process server and put her out because she didn’t pay the back taxes. She died in a single room in Athens, Ga.”

During the ‘30s and 40s, African Americans migrated to the North “to get jobs in the so-called promised land,” Gossett says. The men, he says, “took their ability to work hard up North, sometimes working three or four jobs.”

And the women, he says, raised the children. “I grew up with all my cousins,” he says with a smile. “The men worked and the older women raised us--my mother, my aunt, my grandmother. My great-grandmother was the matriarch and sometimes there were 30 of us. She would cook by hand on a wood stove--chicken and biscuits--and washed us in the bathtub. Everybody got a nice foundation. When my youngest cousin was old enough to get married and move to Long Island, (my great-grandmother) started sniffing and sneezing a little one day. She went to bed and never got up. She died at approximately 115” years old.

Gossett never encountered racism himself until 1956, when he was 18. “I was raised with a whole bunch of people and we didn’t have (racism) in Coney Island,” he says.

He had been acting as a professional for three years when the event occurred. “It was an acting experience,” Gossett says. “I was down in Wilmington, Delaware, doing ‘The Desk Set’ with Shirley Booth. I was at the DuPont Hotel. I walked out and there was this grill next door called the New England Grill. I loved seafood. They said very nicely, ‘We don’t serve colored people.’

“I was crying all during rehearsal,” Gossett recalls. “Shirley Booth, the star of the show, asked me (what was wrong). I told her and she started to pack her bags.”

Booth, though, didn’t end up leaving the production. In fact, when members of the DuPont family, manufacturing scions then and now, learned of the incident, Gossett was invited to their homes for dinner. He even got a personal invitation to return to the New England Grill.

So, did he ever take up the offer?

Gossett smiles and shakes his head. “No,” he says, ever so softly.

“A Father for Charlie” airs Sunday at 9 p.m on CBS.