On Friday, Chadwick Boseman, the actor who gained fame as the star of the seminal “Black Panther” movie and who also played prominent Black icons including Jackie Robinson, James Brown, and Thurgood Marshall, died. He was forty-three.
A statement posted on the Instagram account of Mr. Boseman said the actor discovered in 2016 that he had colon cancer in stage 3, which had advanced to stage 4. He was said to have died in his house, along with his wife and daughter.
“A true warrior, Chadwick persevered through it all, giving you many of the movies you’ve come to enjoy so much,” said the message. “From ‘Marshall’ to ‘Da 5 Bloods,’ ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Ass’ by August Wilson and a few more, all were filmed during and during countless surgeries and chemotherapy.”
News of Mr. Boseman’s death elicited shock and grief among many prominent figures in the arts and civic life. Martin Luther King III, a human-rights activist and the eldest son of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said that the actor had “brought history to life on the silver screen” in his portrayals of Black leaders.
Oprah Winfrey wrote on Twitter that Mr. Boseman was “a gentle gifted SOUL.”
“Showing us all that Greatness in between surgeries and chemo,” she wrote. “The courage, the strength, the power it takes to do that. This is what Dignity looks like.”
Mr. Boseman portrayed the first Black player in Major League Baseball, Jackie Robinson, in “42,” in 2013; the sizzling soul singer James Brown in “Get On Up,” in 2014; and the first Black Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall, in “Marshall,” in 2017.
But he was best known for his role as T’Challa, or the Black Panther, king of the fictional African nation of Wakanda in the 2018 Marvel superhero movie “Black Panther.”
The film was a cultural touchstone — the first major superhero movie with an African protagonist; the first to star a majority Black cast; and in Ryan Coogler, the first to employ a Black writer and director.
The film represented a moment of hope, pride, and empowerment for African-American moviegoers, many of whom planned special outings to see it and came dressed in African-inspired clothing and accessories.
Wakanda was powered by a mystery metal, vibranium, and had evaded the historical traumas endured by much of the rest of Africa, freeing it from the ravages of colonialism and postcolonialism. The phrase “Wakanda forever” became a hashtag and rallying cry.
The statement on Mr. Boseman’s Instagram account said it was “the honor of his career to bring King T’Challa to life in ‘Black Panther.’”
Brian Helgeland, the writer, and director of “42,” which gave Mr. Boseman his breakout role, said that Mr. Boseman reminded him of sturdy, self-assured icons of 1970s virility, like Gene Hackman and Clint Eastwood.
“It’s the way he carries himself, his stillness — you just have that feeling that you’re around a strong person,” Mr. Helgeland said. “There’s a scene in the movie where Robinson’s teammate, Pee Wee Reese, puts his arm around him as a kind of show of solidarity. But Chad flips it on its head. He plays it like, ‘I’m doing fine, I’m tough as nails, but go ahead and put your arm around me if it makes you feel better.’ I think that’s who Chad is as a person.”
Mr. Boseman was born and raised in Anderson, S.C., the youngest of three boys. His mother, Carolyn, was a nurse and his father, Leroy, worked for an agricultural conglomerate and had a side business as an upholsterer.
“I saw him work a lot of third shifts, a lot of night shifts,” Mr. Boseman told The New York Times last year. “Whenever I work a particularly hard week, I think of him.”
His closest role models were his two brothers: Derrick, the eldest, a preacher in Tennessee; and Kevin, a dancer who has performed with the Martha Graham and Alvin Ailey troupes and toured with the stage adaptation of “The Lion King.”
In high school, Mr. Boseman was a serious basketball player but turned to storytelling after a friend and teammate were shot and killed. Mr. Boseman processed his emotions by writing what he eventually realized was a play. When it was time to consider colleges, he chose an arts program at Howard University, with a dream of becoming a director.
At Howard, he took an acting class with the Tony Award-winning actress and director Phylicia Rashad, who helped him get into an elite theater program at the University of Oxford, an adventure he later learned had been financed by a friend of hers: Denzel Washington.
To earn money, Mr. Boseman taught acting to students at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.
After college, he moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he spent his days in coffee shops — playing chess and writing plays to direct, some of which were influenced by hip-hop and pan-African theology.
He landed one-off television roles in “Law & Order,” “CSI: NY” and “Cold Case,” and eventually booked a recurring role in the 2007-9 ABC Family series “Lincoln Heights.”
The show filmed in Los Angeles and afforded Boseman his first real taste of Hollywood.
“Before that, I had just wanted to be an artist in New York,” Mr. Boseman said. “I didn’t understand that coming to L.A. and trying to be a film actor was a completely different thing.”
