Chadwick Boseman

Between 2016 and 2020 Chadwick Boseman played a king three times for Marvel, a Vietnam squad leader for Spike Lee and a jazz trumpeter with a grudge against God. He shot all of it while having chemotherapy. Almost nobody on any of those sets knew, and the few who did kept it to themselves. When he died on 28 August 2020, aged 43, the news landed on the day American baseball was holding its Jackie Robinson Day, honouring the man Boseman had played on screen seven years earlier.

Anderson, Howard and an anonymous benefactor

He was born on 29 November 1976 in Anderson, a small city in South Carolina, to a nurse and a textile factory worker. He wanted to be an architect until a schoolmate was shot dead and he wrote a play about it. That took him to Howard University in Washington, where he graduated in directing in 2000 and where Phylicia Rashad taught him and looked out for him.

Rashad is also responsible for the story he sat on for twenty years. Boseman and several classmates were accepted onto a summer theatre course at Oxford and couldn't afford the fees, so she asked famous friends for help and somebody paid. Only afterwards, reading the donors' letter, did he learn it had been Denzel Washington. He sent a thank-you note and told nobody until 2018. "There is no Black Panther without Denzel Washington," he said then.

Ten years of one-episode parts

The early work was theatre in Brooklyn, directing, writing his own plays and teaching drama to kids in Harlem. On screen he got single episodes: 'Third Watch', 'Lincoln Heights', 'Persons Unknown', a drug dealer in Justified.

In 2003 he lasted a week on the soap 'All My Children'. By his own account, he asked the writers why his character was a bundle of clichés about Black teenagers and gangs, and was let go. The part went to a sixteen-year-old called Michael B. Jordan, who fifteen years later would fight him for the throne of Wakanda.

Three real men

His first film was The Express (2008), but the job that changed things was 42 (2013), playing Jackie Robinson opposite an unrecognisable Harrison Ford. He trained for months with baseball coaches so the swing would hold up on camera, and Robinson's widow approved of what she saw.

A year later he was James Brown in Get On Up (2014), dancing every number himself after months of daily choreography. He completed the set with Marshall (2017), about an early case of the lawyer Thurgood Marshall, later the first Black justice of the US Supreme Court. Draft Day (2014) and Gods of Egypt (2016) filled the gaps.

Wakanda

T'Challa turned up unannounced in Captain America: Civil War (2016), and Boseman took the job seriously from the start. He learned Xhosa from the South African actor John Kani, who played his father, and pushed hard for a king who sounded African rather than American.

Then came Black Panther (2018), directed by Ryan Coogler, with a heavily British supporting bench: Letitia Wright, Daniel Kaluuya, Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis. It took more than 1.3 billion dollars, won three Oscars and became the first superhero film nominated for Best Picture. Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019) followed.

Four years of silence

He was diagnosed with stage III colon cancer in 2016, the same year he first played T'Challa. It later became stage IV. He never went public, and he worked straight through surgery and chemotherapy, so that much of his cast and crew found out at the same time as everyone else.

The last stretch holds some of his best work. He produced and starred in 21 Bridges (2019), giving up part of his own fee so that Sienna Miller could be paid what she had asked for. He led the squad in Da 5 Bloods for Spike Lee, and played the trumpeter Levee opposite Viola Davis in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, adapted from August Wilson's play. It was the last thing he filmed.

Earlier that year he had married the singer Taylor Simone Ledward, his partner since 2015, in a ceremony they never described publicly. The message announcing his death became the most-liked post in Twitter's history.

The awards arrived without him. He won the Golden Globe for 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom', collected by his widow, and was nominated for the Oscar and the BAFTA, losing both to Anthony Hopkins. In 2022 he won an Emmy for voicing T'Challa in Marvel's What If...?. Howard renamed its College of Fine Arts after him in 2021, and in November 2025 his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was unveiled with Coogler, Viola Davis and Michael B. Jordan speaking beside it.

The earliest credit MovieNCo has for Chadwick Boseman is The Express (2008); in all, 17 films over 15 years. They have worked as actor in 17 and producer in 2. Their title most voted by MovieNCo readers is Captain America: Civil War (2016), with 115 votes. Their busiest decade is the 2010s, with 11 titles. The person they have worked with most is Kevin Feige, on 7 films, among them Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War.