Standing an imposing 6 ft 4 1/2 in and featuring a closely shaved head, Duke first became a familiar face to moviegoers in Car Wash (1976) where he portrayed fierce young Black Muslim revolutionary Abdullah Mohammed Akbar (formerly known as Duane), and expanded his repertoire with American Gigolo (1980) where he played a gay pimp. And in the early 1980s he produced and starred in a short-lived CBS TV series Palmerstown, USA about the life, times and relationships between a black family and a white family in a small rural town in the 1930s.

As the action-film-oriented genre became more popular, Duke's presence was perfect to portray a myriad of "tough guy" roles, chiefly alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando and Predator, as well as a DEA chief in The Limey (1999) which was an uncredited role; and a police chief in the Carl Weathers movie Action Jackson. Duke also played a Police Chief opposite Steven Segal, in Exit Wounds. He played a detective investigating a murder in Menace II Society, in which he uttered the famous line, "You done fucked up, you know that, don't you?".

He played a corrupt law enforcement agent in two films opposite Mel Gibson - Bird on a Wire (as an FBI agent) and Payback (as a police detective). Duke appears in X-Men: The Last Stand as Trask, Washington in National Security, Levar in Get Rich or Die Tryin' and Nokes in Bad Country.

Src:Wiki