Actor Andre Braugher, who won an Emmy Award for his portrayal of stern police officers in the TV series Homicide: Life on the Street and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, passed away on Monday. He was sixty-one.
His longtime publicist Jennifer Allen confirmed his passing on Tuesday. She said that following a brief illness, Andre Braugher, a resident of New Jersey, had passed away. She didn’t go into detail.
Andre Braugher, Chief Raymond Holt of ‘Brooklyn Nine’, dies at 61
As a tough police officer in the 1990s Baltimore crime series Homicide, which detailed the difficulties of policing a city plagued by killings, Andre Braugher had a breakthrough performance. The final years of his life were devoted to portraying a different kind of serious police officer in Brooklyn Nine-Nine: He played the police commander in the sitcom series just for laughs. He was praised for portraying an openly gay police officer who defied stereotypes.
In between, he demonstrated his versatility by taking on roles as varied as those of Henry V from Shakespeare, Owen Thoreau Jr., an automobile salesman, and an executive editor of The New York Times who was tasked with handling the investigative reporting that would usher in the #MeToo era.
“I’ve worked with a lot of wonderful actors,” ex-journalist David Simon said on social media platform X, formerly Twitter. Simon wrote the book on which Homicide was based years before he created the groundbreaking crime drama The Wire. “I’ll never work with one better.”
Born on July 1, 1962, Andre Keith Andre Braugher was raised on Chicago’s West Side. Sally Braugher, his mother, was employed by the US Postal Service. Floyd Andre Braugher, his father, operated heavy machinery for the Illinois state government.
In 2014, he told The New York Times, “We lived in a ghetto.” “I could have acted like I wasn’t a square and was hard or tough. In the end, I avoided trouble. Though I don’t think I’m particularly wise, I will admit that it’s obvious that some people want to leave and others don’t. I desired to be done with it.”
After attending the elite Jesuit Catholic high school St. Ignatius College Prep in Chicago, Andre Braugher was awarded a scholarship to Stanford University. His father was enraged when his son chose acting over engineering since he wanted to be an engineer.
At the time, his father said to him, “Show me Black actors who are making a living.” “What the hell are you going to do, juggle and travel the country?”
Andre Braugher obtained a Master of Fine Arts from the Juilliard School subsequent to his graduation with a math major from Stanford.
Glory, an Oscar-winning 1989 film about Black soldiers fighting for the Union during the American Civil War, featured one of his first professional acting roles.
Matthew Broderick, Morgan Freeman, and Denzel Washington were the main actors in the cast. In that year, Braugher told the Times, “I’d rather not work than do a part I’m ashamed of.” ” I can perceive you now that my mom will be glad for me when she sees me in this job.”
Despite frequently working in California, Braugher insisted on residing in New Jersey and went on to star in numerous other movies. Highlights included the 1996 film Get on the Bus, which followed a group of Black men as they traveled to Washington for the Million Man March, and the 1998 film City of Angels, which told the story of an angel (Nicolas Cage) who falls in love with a physician (Meg Ryan).
She Said (2022), a drama about New York Times reporters’ attempts to compile evidence of sexual abuse by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, was one of Braugher’s final motion picture projects. At the time, Braugher portrayed the newspaper’s executive editor, Dean Baquet.
At the New York Shakespeare Festival and other events, Braugher also played Shakespearean roles. He revealed to the Times in 2014 that he intended to save the play Pericles, Prince of Tyre for a later time in his life.
“I’ve never perused it since I might want to see one Shakespeare play that I don’t have any idea what occurs,” he expressed.
According to Allen, Andre Braugher is survived by his mother, brother Charles Jennings, sons Michael, Isaiah, and John Wesley, and wife, actress Ami Brabson. According to the entertainment website Deadline, production on his most recent project, a miniseries about a murder in the White House called The Residence, was set to resume in January following its suspension due to the Writers Guild of America strike. It was unclear if his role would be eliminated or recast.
Braugher’s most well-known roles were in critically acclaimed television shows. He portrayed an unconventional doctor in the ABC drama Gideon’s Crossing from 2000 to 2001, and he played car salesman Owen Thoreau Jr. in the TNT series Men of a Certain Age from 2009 to 2011. Additionally, from 2017 to 2022, he starred in the sixth and final season of the legal drama The Good Fight onParamount.
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In the police procedural Homicide, which aired from 1993 to 1998, Andre Braugher portrayed Baltimore homicide detective Frank Pembleton. He won two Television Critics Association Awards for best actor in a drama series in 1997 and 1998, as well as an Emmy Award in 1998 for his breakthrough performance.
His starring role as a gang leader in the FX miniseries Thief, which was about crime in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, earned him an Emmy in 2006 execution by a lead entertainer in a miniseries.
Additionally, Andre Braugher portrayed the humorously strict precinct commander Capt. Ray Holt on the comedy series Brooklyn Nine Nine, which ran from 2013 to 2021. In addition to winning two Critics Choice Awards for best supporting actor in a comedy series, he was nominated for four Emmys.
He told The New York Times that he thought there were similarities between Homicide and Brooklyn Nine Nine after the first few episodes of the show aired.