Chadwick Boseman, who has
died aged 43, was a thoughtful, charismatic actor who achieved overnight
superstardom via his role as T’Challa in Black Panther (2018), a comic-book
blockbuster that achieved uncommon cultural reach and impact.
In part, the film was
conceived as a corrective to previous, predominantly Caucasian superhero
narratives: it transported cinemagoers to Wakanda, a fictional, Brigadoon-like
African enclave that had survived uncolonised, and thus grown rich in natural
resources. In Boseman, director Ryan Coogler found an ideal figurehead. Tall
and athletic yet stately in his bearing, the actor made T’Challa equal parts scholar
and warrior, carrying the weight of a people on his shoulders – a burden only sporadically
lifted amid the film’s frenetic action scenes.
Such spectacle helped
make Black Panther an immediate hit – it grossed over $1 billion at the
international box office – yet the film also earned seven Oscar nominations
(winning three), and Boseman won both People’s Choice and NAACP awards for his
performance.
The actor remained
acutely aware of what T’Challa and Wakanda represented to millions across the
globe, as his acceptance speech at the 2019 Screen Actors Guild awards
underlined. “All of us up here know what it’s like to be told there is not a
place for you to be featured, yet you are young, gifted and black," he said.
“We know what it’s like to be told there’s not a screen for you to be featured
on, nor a stage for you to be featured on. We know what it’s like to be the
tail and not the head, to be beneath and not above. That is what we went to
work with every day."
Beyond the Marvel
Cinematic Universe, Boseman drew acclaim for his performances in three diverse
studies of groundbreaking African-Americans. In the handsome 42 (2013),
he nimbly embodied Jackie Robinson, the first Black player in major-league
baseball. Boseman then reinvented himself for the skittering musical biopic Get
On Up (2014): too upright to resemble James Brown, he nonetheless approximated
the singer’s unique sound, keeping up a rich flow of self-aggrandising patter.
Marshall (2017) found Boseman on more restrained form,
playing the young Thurgood Marshall, the first Black judge on the U.S. Supreme
Court. A keen student of African-American history, Boseman brought a heightened
sense of responsibility to such parts, telling an interviewer at the time of 42:
“[Robinson] started something – I would even say maybe he didn’t even start it,
it started before him. But he carried the torch. And he carried it alone for a
period of time before other people could help him.”
He was born Chadwick
Aaron Boseman in Anderson, South Carolina on November 29, 1976, the son of
upholsterer Leroy Boseman and his wife Carolyn (née Mattress), a nurse. He
studied at TL Hanna High School, where he wrote a play, Crossroads,
about the shooting of a classmate, and then attended Howard University in
Washington, where he majored in directing.
One of his mentors there
was the erstwhile Cosby Show actress Phylicia Rashad, who raised funds
from fellow performers – including Denzel Washington – to send Boseman and
several classmates to attend the British American Drama Academy’s midsummer
acting program in Oxford in 1998. (Washington joked on a recent chat show that
he was awaiting repayment: “Sure, yeah, Wakanda forever, but where’s my money?”)
Ian Wooldridge, the
Academy’s former dean, remembers Boseman as “diligent, enthusiastic, with a
great wit; generous and a joy to work with in the room. He was always smiling.
He had a tremendous relationship with language and text. He knew how to use it
and relish it… He was special.”
Upon returning to America,
Boseman enrolled at New York’s Digital Film Academy, and began pursuing acting
work. He was set to make his screen debut on long-running soap All My
Children in 2003, but was fired after objecting to racist material; Boseman’s
Black Panther co-star Michael B. Jordan was recast in the role.
His actual debut followed
later that year on the procedural drama Third Watch, followed by parts in
Law & Order (in 2004), CSI: NY (2006) and e.r. (2008).
He made his big-screen debut in the American football drama The Express
(2008), appearing in the Kevin Costner gridiron drama Draft Day (2014)
and as the Egyptian deity Thoth in the flop Gods of Egypt (2016), before
making his first appearance as T’Challa in Captain America: Civil War
(2016). (The character recurred in Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers:Endgame (2019).)
He lent heft to the middling
detective thriller 21 Bridges (2019) and was a haunting presence amid
the Vietnam scenes of Spike Lee’s Netflix-bound Da 5 Bloods (2020); his
final film, an adaptation of August Wilson’s stage success Ma Rainey’s Black
Bottom, will appear on the streaming platform later this year.
He directed two shorts, Blood
Over a Broken Pawn (2008) and Heaven (2012), and saw his play Deep
Azure nominated for the Joseph Jefferson Award for New Work in 2006. “I
started out as a writer and a director,” he told one interviewer. “I started
acting because I wanted to know how to relate to the actors.”
Diagnosed with
stage-three colon cancer in 2016, he is survived by a wife, the singer Taylor
Simone Ledward, whom he married in late 2019.
Chadwick Boseman, born November 29, 1976, died August 28, 2020.
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