Chadwick Aaron Boseman (; November 29, 1976August 28, 2020) was an American actor. He was known for his portrayals of heroic and real life individuals. During his two-decade career, Boseman received multiple accolades, including two Screen Actors Guild Awards, a Golden Globe Award, a Critics' Choice Movie Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and an Academy Award nomination.
After studying directing at Howard University, Boseman began his career in theatre, winning 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 Black Panther in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) from 2016 to 2019. He appeared in four MCU films, including an eponymous 2018 film that earned him an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actor in a Motion Picture and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. 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 in 2020 from the illness. His final films include Spike Lee's war drama Da 5 Bloods and the adaptation of August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom; the latter was released posthumously the same year to universal critical acclaim earning him the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Actor in a Leading Role and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama as well as a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Early life and education
Chadwick Aaron Boseman was born and raised in Anderson, South Carolina, the son of Carolyn (née Mattress) and Leroy Boseman, both African-American. His mother was a nurse, and his father 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.