Chadwick Aaron Boseman (November 29, 1976 – August 28, 2020) was an American actor. Among other honors, Boseman received two Screen Actors Guild Awards, a Golden Globe Award, a Critics’ Choice Movie Award, and a Primetime Emmy Award during his two-decade career.
He was also nominated for an Academy Award. Boseman began his career in theatre after studying directing at Howard University, winning a Drama League Directing Fellowship and an acting AUDELCO, as well as a Jeff Award nomination for his 2005 play Deep Azure. In his first major role on the big screen, he was a series regular on the NBC drama Person Unknown (2010) before landing his breakthrough role as baseball player Jackie Robinson in the 2013 biographical film 42. He continued to play historical figures, appearing in Get on Up (2014) as singer James Brown and Marshall as attorney Thurgood Marshall.
From 2016 to 2019, Boseman rose to international prominence as the Marvel Comics superhero Black Panther in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). He appeared in four MCU films, including the 2018 eponymous film, for which he received 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. He was also named to the 2018 Time 100 for being the first black actor to star in an MCU film. Boseman received a posthumous Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance for his final performance as the character in the Disney+ anthology series What If…? (2021). Boseman was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2016. He kept his illness private, continuing to act until his death from the illness in 2020. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, his final film, was released posthumously the same year and received 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 for his work in Da 5 Bloods and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom at the 27th Screen Actors Guild Awards, the most for a single performer at a single ceremony, winning Male Actor in a Leading Role for the latter.
Where did Chadwick Aaron Boseman go to high school?
Boseman attended T. L. Hanna High School and was a member of the basketball team. After a classmate was shot and killed, he wrote and staged his first play, Crossroads, during his junior year. At T. L. Hanna, he competed in Speech and Debate with the National Speech and Debate Association. At the 1995 National Tournament, he finished eighth in Original Oratory. He was recruited to play basketball in college but chose to study the arts instead, graduating in 2000 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in directing from Howard University in Washington, D.C. While at Howard, he worked in an African American-oriented bookstore near the university, which was important and inspirational to him, according to friend Vanessa German; he drew on his experience there for his play Hieroglyphic Graffiti.
