Chadwick Boseman has died. As the star of Marvel’s
Black Panther —to say nothing of his career-making
performance as Jackie Robinson in the 2013 biopic
42 —Boseman lent quiet dignity and irresistible
charisma to some of the most iconic roles of the last
10 years of film-making. According to the Associated
Press, Boseman died today after a four-year battle
with colon cancer. He was 43.

Born in South Carolina, Boseman studied acting and
directing at Howard University and Oxford, before
making his way to Los Angeles to pursue an acting
career. He then spent more than a decade working
in the trenches of TV, notching single-episode stints
on dramas like Third Watch , ER , and CSI: NY , and more
regular roles on shows like Lincoln Heights and Persons
Unknown —the latter his first actual starring gig. But
Boseman’s career suddenly skyrocketed in 2013,
when he scored the role of barrier-breaking
baseball star Robinson in Bryan Helgeland’s 42 .
Boseman drew praise for his performance, winning
the approval of Robinson’s widow, and holding his
own against an over-the-top Harrison Ford. (Our
own review from the time, amusingly, refers to him
as “a TV and film bit player,” before pointing out
how well he embodied the role.)


Now an established name, Boseman stayed in the
biopic lane with his next major project, taking on
the far more flamboyant part of James Brown for
2014's Get On Up . But it wasn’t until two years later
that Boseman would step into a role that was truly
his , rather than an impression or recreation. That,
after all, was when he was cast in Captain America:
Civil War , the first film in which he played T’Challa,
future king of Wakanda—but already the Black
Panther.


In some ways, it was easy for Boseman’s quietly
heroic performance as T’Challa to be over-
shadowed—most especially in a film like
2018's Black Panther , which pitted him against many
of the most charismatic performers of the entire
MCU. But Boseman never let you forget that you
weren’t just watching some random superhero,
beating up Killmonger or battling it out alongside
the Avengers—you were watching a king . Reserved,
charming, and even occasionally, adorably,
awkward, Boseman infused the character—who he
played in 4 films, most recently 2019's Avengers:
Endgame —with a humanity that lived alongside the
dignity, and sometimes even the arrogance, of
royalty. And to know, now, that he was
accomplishing this feat of mythmaking-in-the-
making while also fighting stage III, and then stage
IV, colon cancer, only makes his accomplishments
all the more staggering.


Boseman filmed two more movies in the wake of
Endgame , lending his talents first to Brian Kirk’s
thriller 21 Bridges, and then to Spike Lee’s recent war
film Da 5 Bloods . He completed a third, George C.
Wolfe’s adaptation of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s
Black Bottom, last year, although it’s yet to be
released. Which is, of course, among the most
depressing aspect of his death: The feeling of an
ascent not just muffled, but actively ripped away.
There’s something very cruel about the fact that
we’ll never get to see what Chadwick Boseman does
next, to see how he took a moment of sudden
superstardom and transformed it into a career of
fascinating parts. Instead, we’re left with a body of
work that still speaks for itself—even if the fact that
it now has to can’t help but feel like anything but a
tragedy.

RIP CHADWICK BOSEMAN

Source:https://www.darkhorizons.com/r-i-p-chadwick-boseman/

YouTube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=LoUYHeJVpBo