On Tuesday it was revealed that Andre Braugher, beloved and award-winning thespian, has died after a short illness. He was 61.
Braugher had a storied and diverse career, spanning stage and screen, both big and small. He’s best known, though, for two cop shows, each very different from the other. The first is Homicide: Life on the Street, the gritty procedural about the Baltimore Police Department, which catapulted him to fame an Emmy. The other is Brooklyn Nine-Nine, a comedy in which he brought the same level of intensity as he had on Homicide, holding his own with seasoned comics like Andy Samberg, Joe Lo Truglio, and Terry Crews.
A graduate of Stanford and Juilliard, Braugher got his start with a meaty role in 1989’s Civil War drama Glory, in which he played an educated freed slave who joins the Union’s all-black regiment.
It was his turn as Detective Frank Pemberton across seven seasons of Homicide that made him a staple of film and TV. He had always welcome supporting roles in Primal Fear with Richard Gere and Edward Norton, in Spike Lee’s Get on the Bus, in City of Angels and Frequency and Poseidon. His last film was She Said, which documented the New York Times investigation that uncovered the Harvey Weinstein scandal.
On TV he appeared in the WWII movie The Tuskegee Airmen, on the TNT drama Men of a Certain Age, and made appearances on the likes of House, New Girl, BoJack Horseman, and The Good Fight. He reprised Pemberton on Law & Order, as his Homicide costar Richard Belzer did.
Braugher also had one of the great voices.
That Braugher was on two big cop shows does not mean he was necessarily pro-cop. Brooklyn Nine-Nine headed into its eighth and final season in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, when a comedy about police no longer seemed so funny. Braugher addressed the “new challenge” facing the show, which had to find a way to tell jokes without parroting false ideas.
“It’s a very complicated subject, but I think they have to be portrayed much more realistically, in terms of this: The convention… that police breaking the law is okay because somehow it’s in the service of some greater good, is a myth that needs to be destroyed,” he told Entertainment Weekly at the time.
Braugher left behind a vast body of work that will be studied and shared for time immemorial. We leave you with some of his most beautiful line readings, of too many to count, from Brooklyn Nine-Nine. RIP to a legend.
(Via Deadline)
