Chadwick Aaron Boseman (November 29, 1976 – August 28, 2020) was an American actor. During his two-decade career, Boseman received two Screen Actors Guild Awards, a Golden Globe Award, a Critics’ Choice Movie Award, and a Primetime Emmy Award, among other accolades. He was also nominated for an Academy Award.
Chadwick Aaron Boseman was born and raised in Anderson, South Carolina. According to Boseman, DNA testing indicated that some of his ancestors were Krio people and Limba people from Sierra Leone, and Yoruba people from Nigeria.
In his youth, Boseman practiced martial arts, and continued this training as an adult. 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.
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 performance as baseball player Jackie Robinson in the 2013 biographical film 42. He continued to portray historical figures, starring as singer James Brown in Get on Up (2014) and as attorney 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 film, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, was released posthumously the same year to critical acclaim, earning him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama. Boseman also received four nominations at the 27th Screen Actors Guild Awards for his work in Da 5 Bloods and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the most for a performer at a single ceremony, winning Male Actor in a Leading Role for the latter.
Lady G Adventures 