NEW YORK - Andre Braugher, an Emmy Award-winning American actor who starred in television series Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Homicide: Life On The Street, among many other shows and films, died on Dec 11. He was 61.
His death was confirmed on Dec 12 by his longtime publicist Jennifer Allen. She said that Braugher, who lived in New Jersey, had died after a brief illness. She did not elaborate.
On Homicide, a police procedural that ran for about six years in the 1990s, Braugher played Frank Pembleton, a Baltimore homicide detective. It was a breakout role that earned him an Emmy Award in 1998.
On Brooklyn Nine Nine, a comedy series that aired from 2013 to 2021, Braugher played another stoic police officer, Captain Ray Holt. He received four Emmy nominations and won two Critics Choice Awards for best supporting actor in a comedy series. He was lauded for his sensitive portrayal of an openly gay cop.
Andre Keith Braugher was born on July 1, 1962, and grew up on Chicago’s West Side. His father, Floyd Braugher, was a heavy-equipment operator for the state of Illinois. His mother, Sally Braugher, worked for the United States Postal Service.
“We lived in a ghetto,” he told The New York Times in 2014. “I could have pretended I was hard or tough and not a square. I wound up not getting in trouble. I don’t consider myself to be especially wise, but I will say that it’s pretty clear that some people want to get out and some people don’t. I wanted out.”
Braugher attended St Ignatius College Prep, a prestigious Jesuit Catholic high school in Chicago, and later earned a scholarship to Stanford University. His father, who wanted his son to be an engineer, was furious when he gravitated to acting instead.
Black actors like James Earl Jones and Sidney Poitier were “superstars”, his father told him at the time. “Show me black actors who are earning a living. What the hell are you going to do, juggle and travel the country?”
After graduating from Stanford with a major in math, Braugher earned a Master of Fine Arts from the Juilliard School.
One of his first professional acting roles was in Glory, an Oscar-winning 1989 film about black soldiers fighting for the Union Army during the American Civil War. Its star-studded cast included Matthew Broderick, Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington.
“I’d rather not work than do a part I’m ashamed of,” Braugher told the Times that year. “I can tell you now that my mother will be proud of me when she sees me in this role.”
He would go on to star in many other films. One of his last roles was in She Said (2022), a drama about New York Times reporters’ efforts to document sexual abuse by film mogul Harvey Weinstein. Braugher played Dean Baquet, the newspaper’s executive editor at the time.
Braugher, a Shakespeare aficionado, also performed at the New York Shakespeare Festival and other venues. In 2014, he told the Times that he was saving the play Pericles, Prince Of Tyre, for later in life.
“I’ve never read it because I’d like to see one Shakespeare play that I don’t know what happens,” he said.
But Braugher was best known for his roles on acclaimed TV shows, which also included the lead role of an unorthodox physician on the ABC Drama Gideon’s Crossing (2000 to 2001) and a car salesman on the TNT series Men Of A Certain Age (2009 to 2011).
Allen said that Braugher is survived by his wife, actress Ami Brabson; his sons Michael, Isaiah and John Wesley; his brother, Charles Jennings; and his mother. NYTIMES
