Chadwick Boseman

Chadwick Boseman (born November 29, 1976, Anderson, South Carolina, U.S.—died August 28, 2020, Los Angeles, California) was an American actor and playwright who became a highly respected movie star with several iconic roles, notably that of T’Challa/Black Panther in the groundbreaking film Black Panther (2018).

Boseman was the youngest of three children. His father worked for an agricultural conglomerate and did upholstery work on the side, and his mother was a nurse. He played basketball as a high-school student, but when a teammate was shot and killed, Boseman responded by writing a play and found that he felt called to become a storyteller. After graduating from high school in 1995, he studied directing at Howard University (B.F.A., 2000). While a student there, he took (1998) acting classes in a summer program of the British American Drama Academy at the University of Oxford and visited Ghana.

After college Boseman moved to Brooklyn and studied at the Digital Film Academy in Manhattan. He supported himself by teaching acting at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, and he worked in the theatre, writing, directing, and acting. He performed with New York City’s National Shakespeare Company and cowrote and was cast in the hip-hop play Rhyme Deferred. He wrote and directed Hieroglyphic Graffiti (2001), which debuted at the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Deep Azure (2005), which was commissioned by Chicago’s Congo Square Theatre Company.

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During this time Boseman also began appearing on television, beginning with a guest spot in 2003 on the police series Third Watch. He also briefly acted on the soap opera All My Children in a role later assumed by Michael B. Jordan. Other TV credits included Law & Order, CSI: NY, and ER. He had a recurring role (2008–09) on Lincoln Heights and was cast in the short-lived mystery series Persons Unknown (2010).

Boseman also pursued film roles, and in 2008 he made his big-screen debut, appearing in the football biopic The Express. He then starred in The Kill Hole (2012), a thriller about an Iraq War veteran sent to kill another veteran in the Pacific Northwest. While that film was largely ignored, Boseman attracted wider notice when he was cast as baseball player Jackie Robinson in the much-anticipated biopic 42 (2013). His performance as a man who had to keep his feelings hidden was generally praised, as was his athleticism. He next played linebacker prospect Vontae Mack in Draft Day (2014), starring Kevin Costner, before taking on the portrayal of music legend James Brown in Get On Up (2014). Boseman’s evocation of Brown was widely hailed as riveting and unforgettable.

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In 2016 Boseman played Thoth in the critically panned Gods of Egypt and starred in the little-seen revenge thriller Message from the King. However, his most notable film that year was Captain America: Civil War, in which he first appeared as Marvel superhero T’Challa/Black Panther, king of the fictional African country Wakanda who has an alter ego. Boseman next portrayed a young Thurgood Marshall as an NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) lawyer in Marshall (2017). Boseman reprised the role of T’Challa in Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster Black Panther, and his performance cemented his status as a first-rank movie star. In addition, Black Panther made news as the first big-budget movie with an almost all-Black cast, and T’Challa became a highly celebrated icon. Boseman played the character again in Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019) before starring in the police thriller 21 Bridges (2019). In 2020 he portrayed a revered fallen squad leader in Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, centring on the Vietnam War.

Boseman’s breathtaking performance as the complex, wounded, and gifted musician Levee in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020), based on the play by August Wilson, was a tour de force, for which he received a posthumous Academy Award nomination. It was his final role. Boseman died of colon cancer on August 28, 2020, and it was revealed that he had been first diagnosed with the disease in 2016.

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