Chadwick Boseman

Chadwick Aaron Boseman (; November 29, 1976 – August 28, 2020) was an American actor and playwright. Through his two-decade career, he appeared in a number of projects spanning both blockbuster and independent films, and received various accolades, including a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a Primetime Emmy Award, in addition to nominations for an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award.

Born in South Carolina, Boseman studied directing at Howard University and began his career in theatre. Boseman won a Drama League Directing Fellowship and an acting AUDELCO, along with receiving a Jeff Award nomination for his 2005 play Deep Azure. Transitioning to the screen, his first major role was as a series regular on the NBC drama Persons Unknown (2010) and he landed his breakthrough role as baseball player Jackie Robinson in 42 (2013). He continued to portray historical figures, starring as singer James Brown in Get on Up (2014) and as Thurgood Marshall in Marshall (2017).

Boseman achieved international fame for playing the Marvel Comics superhero T'Challa (Black Panther) in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) from 2016 to 2019. He appeared in four MCU films, including an eponymous 2018 film. As the first Black actor to headline an MCU film, he was also named in the 2018 Time 100. Boseman's final performance as the character in the Disney+ anthology series What If...? (2021) earned him a posthumous Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance.

In 2016, Boseman was diagnosed with colon cancer. He kept his condition private, continuing to act until his death from the illness in 2020. For his final film role, the drama Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020), he received the Golden Globe and SAG Awards for Best Actor, along with a posthumous nomination for the Oscar in the same category.

Life and career

Early years and education

Boseman was born on November 29, 1976, in Anderson, South Carolina, where he was raised. His mother, Carolyn, was a nurse. His father, Leroy worked at a textile factory and managed an upholstery business. In his youth, Boseman practiced martial arts, and continued this training as an adult. As a child, he wanted to become an architect. According to Boseman, DNA testing indicated that some of his ancestors were Jola people from Guinea-Bissau, Krio people and Limba people from Sierra Leone, and Yoruba people from Nigeria.

Boseman graduated from T. L. Hanna High School in 1995, where he played on the basketball team. In his junior year, he wrote his first play, Crossroads, and staged it at the school after a classmate was shot and killed. He competed in Speech and Debate in the National Speech and Debate Association at T. L. Hanna. He placed eighth in Original Oratory at the 1995 National Tournament. He was recruited to play basketball at college but chose the arts instead, attending college at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and graduating in 2000 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in directing. While at Howard, he worked in an African American–oriented bookstore near the university, which friend Vanessa German said was important and inspirational to him; he drew on his experience there for his play Hieroglyphic Graffiti.

His teachers at Howard included Al Freeman Jr. and Phylicia Rashad, who became a mentor. Rashad helped raise funds, notably from her friend and prominent actor Denzel Washington, so that Boseman and other classmates could attend the Oxford Summer Program of the British American Drama Academy at Balliol College, Oxford, in England, to which they had been accepted. Boseman wanted to write and direct, and initially began studying acting to learn how to relate to actors. He attended the program in 1998, and he developed an appreciation for the playwriting of William Shakespeare; additionally, he studied the works of various dramatists, including Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. He also traveled to Africa for the first time while at college, working in Ghana with his professor Mike Malone "to preserve and celebrate rituals with performances on a proscenium stage"; he said it was "one of the most significant learning experiences of [his] life". After he returned to the U.S., he took additional course work in film studies, graduating from New York City's Digital Film Academy.

2000–2007: Theater, Deep Azure, and early television

Boseman lived in Brooklyn, New York City, at the start of his career. In 2000, he was named a Drama League Directing Fellow. He directed productions including George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum (Wolfe would later direct Boseman in his final role) and a staging of Amiri Baraka's Dutchman. He worked as the drama instructor in the Schomburg Junior Scholars Program, housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem between 2002 and 2009.

He rose to prominence as a playwright and stage actor in 2002, performing in multiple productions and winning an AUDELCO award in 2002 for his part in Ron Milner's Urban Transitions. As a member of the National Shakespeare Company of New York, he played Romeo in Romeo and Juliet and Malcolm in Macbeth. He directed and wrote plays as part of the Hip-hop theater movement; his works included Rhyme Deferred (co-written with Howard classmate Kamilah Forbes), in which he also performed, and Hieroglyphic Graffiti. Rhyme Deferred was commissioned for a national tour, as well as featuring in The Fire This Time anthology of works, while Hieroglyphic Graffiti was produced at a variety of locations, including the National Black Theatre Festival in 2001. Combining modern African-American culture and Egyptian deities, it is set in Washington, D.C., and was picked up by the New York Hip-Hop Theatre Festival and Tennessee State University's summer stock theatre program in 2002. It was also the Kuntu Repertory Theatre's 2002–03 season launch production. At the 2002 Hip-Hop Theatre Festival, Boseman also gave a one-man show called "Red Clay and Carved Concrete".

In 2003, Boseman was cast in his first television role, an episode of Third Watch, and began playing Reggie Montgomery in the daytime soap opera All My Children. He was fired from All My Children after voicing concerns to producers about racist stereotypes in the script; the role was subsequently re-cast, with Boseman's future Black Panther co-star Michael B. Jordan taking the part. Boseman had wanted to work around the stereotypes of the character, feeling that being in a soap opera would give him more room for improvisation as the writers often do not initially plan a full story; his (then-future) agent said that when Boseman was given the second script and learned that his character's parents were a drug addict and an absent father, Boseman confronted the creators. He reflected on the experience in his 2018 commencement address to Howard University, saying that it "seemed to be wrapped up in assumptions about us as black folks [and he] would have to make something out of nothing." His other early television work included episodes of the series Law & Order, Cold Case, CSI: NY, and ER.

Boseman's best-known play, Deep Azure, was commissioned in 2004 by the Congo Square Theatre Company in Chicago. It was nominated for a 2006 Jeff Award for Best New Work. Boseman said at the time that Deep Azure was "a fusion and progression of [his] previous plays", which he did not feel fit wholly in the Hip Hop theater genre. The play – about police brutality, a daring subject in 2004, and largely delivered in rhyme – was workshopped at the Apollo Theater in New York. Drama critic Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune highly praised the work. In 2008, Boseman turned Deep Azure into a screenplay. Michael Greene, who would become his agent, picked it up and contacted Boseman when Tessa Thompson and Omari Hardwick expressed an interest in playing the lead roles, prompting Boseman's move to Los Angeles. He also directed, wrote, and produced the short film Blood Over a Broken Pawn in 2007, which was honored at the 2008 Hollywood Black Film Festival.

2008–2015: Breakthrough with 42 and Get on Up

In 2008, Boseman moved to Los Angeles to pursue his film and acting career. He was cast in a recurring role on the television series Lincoln Heights as Nathaniel Ray Taylor, an army veteran with PTSD who was later revealed to be the son of the main character before re-enlisting. He also appeared in his first feature film in 2008, The Express: The Ernie Davis Story, as running back Floyd Little. He landed his first regular role in the 2010 television series Persons Unknown as the Marine Graham McNair. The show received mediocre reviews that felt the characters were all archetypes with little development. In July 2013, Boseman's second short film as director, Heaven, premiered at the HollyShorts Film Festival.