Chadwick Aaron Boseman was born to Carolyn and Leroy Boseman and was raised in Anderson, South Carolina. His mother was a nurse and his father worked at a textile factory, managing an upholstery business. Boseman graduated from T. L. Hanna High School in 1995, where he played on the basketball team. Right from an incredibly young age, Boseman had a knack for acting, directing and playwriting. In fact, he was only in his junior year when he wrote his first play, Crossroads, and staged it at the school, after a classmate was shot and killed. Boseman’s love for writing and directing only continued to increase as he grew older and he eventually attended college at Howard University in Washington, D.C., graduating in 2000 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in directing.
One of his teachers was Phylicia Rashad, who became his mentor. It was she who helped raise the funds required for Boseman to attend the Oxford Mid-Summer Program of the British American Drama Academy in England. A significant portion of these funds were provided by none other than Denzel Washington, who at the time was a friend of Phylicia Rashad. Following the completion of the program, Boseman returned to the US where he later graduated from New York City’s Digital Film Academy. Eventually, in 2008, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue his craft on the big screen.
But it took two years before he landed his first major role as a series regular on Persons Unknown in 2010. However, his first breakthrough performance on the big screen didn’t come until three years later, in 2013, when he landed the part of famous baseball player Jackie Robinson in the biographical film 42. There onwards he continued to portray a number of historical figures, starring as singer James Brown in Get on Up in 2014 and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in the 2017 film Marshall. He also had choice parts in The Express (2008), Draft Day (2014), and Message from the King (2016).
However, it wasn’t until he took on the mask of the superhero Black Panther in Captain America: Civil War, a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in 2016, that he truly achieved international fame. The title film Black Panther, which came out two years later in 2018, cemented his super stardom by becoming the first ever Marvel Cinematic Universe movie to have an opening weekend’s domestic box office receipts surpass the production cost of that movie. In the case of ‘Black Panther’, its Thursday night, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday opening weekend domestic box office came to USD 202 million, surpassing the movies production cost by a cool USD 2 million. Furthermore, as the first African American actor to headline an MCU film, Boseman’s name was also added to the 2018 Time 100.
Unfortunately, Boseman was diagnosed with stage III colon cancer in 2016, which eventually progressed to stage IV before 2020. For nearly the entire duration, Boseman kept his illness a secret, never ever speaking about it publicly. In fact, only a handful of non-family members knew that Boseman was sick and fewer still had any knowledge about the severity of his condition. Even during his treatment, Boseman continued to work and even completed the production for several films, including Marshall, Da 5 Bloods, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, among others. Boseman eventually passed away at his home with his wife and family by his side, on August 28, 2020. He was 43 at the time.
At the time of Boseman’s death, Black Panther was the only movie with an African-American lead and primarily Africa-American cast to exceed USD 1 billion in paid box office, and was also the eleventh highest grossing film of all time, having earned USD 1,346,900,000 in total gross revenue.
Following his untimely death, Marvel Studios announced that his role of Black Panther would not be recast for future films, meaning that Boseman would be the one and only actor to be cast as Black Panther. This announcement effectively cancelled the previously announced Black Panther sequel as well as foreclosing the possibility of any new cast member portraying the Black Panther role in future instalments of the franchise.
His final film, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, is scheduled to be released posthumously. He was also cast and contracted to appear in yet another film, Yasuke, which was in pre-production at the time of his death. However, the producers have yet to announce whether the film production will continue with another actor, or whether the production will be terminated.