Chadwick Boseman was a Black actor with an estimated net worth of $12 million at the time of his death. He's best known for playing T'Challa in the Marvel Universe, including the title role in Black Panther. 

He got his first television role in 2003, in an episode of Third Watch. Soon after, he was cast as Reggie Porter Montgomery in the long-running soap opera All My Children. However, he was fired from the show after questioning the stereotypical nature of his character's backstory. He was replaced by Michael B. Jordan, who would go on to star opposite him in the Marvel films, over ten years later. Chadwick also played roles in episodes of the television series ER, CSI: NY, and Law & Order.

Born in Anderson, South Carolina on November 29th, 1976, to Carolyn and Leroy Boseman, Chadwick's mother was a nurse and his father worked in a textile factory and managed an upholstery business. In 1995 Boseman graduated from T. L. Hanna High School. In his junior year, he wrote his first play, Crossroads, and staged it at the school after a classmate was shot and killed. He was recruited to play basketball at college but instead chose to pursue an arts degree. He attended Howard University in Washington, DC, and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in directing in 2000. During his time at Howard University, his teacher Phylicia Rashad became a mentor to him. Rashad helped to raise funds - in part from her close friend, the actor Denzel Washington - for Boseman and a number of other students to attend the Oxford Summer Program of the British American Drama Academy at Balliol College, Oxford, in England, onto which they had been accepted. Boseman attended the program in 1998 where the cohort studied the work of William Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, and Harold Pinter. During his undergraduate degree, he also traveled to Ghana with his professor Mike Malone.

He continued writing plays, and his script for Deep Azure showed in Chicago, Illinois' Congo Square Theatre Company in 2004. This play earned him a nomination for the Joseph Jefferson Award in 2006.  In 2008, he moved from New York to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career, taking a recurring role as Nathaniel Taylor in the television series Lincoln Heights and appearing in the movie The Express as running back Floyd Little.

His breakthrough film role came in 2013 with the film 42, in which he starred as the baseball player Jackie Robinson. The following year, Boseman appeared opposite Kevin Costner in the film Draft Day as an NFL draft prospect; he played James Brown in biopic  Get On Up that same year. In 2016, he starred as the Egyptian mythological deity Thoth in the movie Gods of Egypt.

His first movie as the character Black Panther or T'Challa with Marvel Comics was in Captain America: Civil War in 2016 - the first of a five-picture deal with Marvel. In 2018, he returned to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the titular character in Black Panther. As the first mega-budget film featuring a predominantly Black cast and director, as well as being the first superhero film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, it was seen as a landmark moment and gained him attention and fame outside of the Marvel fan base. He reprised the role in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame in 2018 and 2019.

Aside from Marvel movies, he appeared as Thurgood Marshall in the biopic Marshall in 2017, and in the thriller 21 Bridges in 2019, opposite Sienna Miller. Boseman was also a producer on 21 Bridges and sought Miller out specifically as his co-star. When she requested a salary the studio would not meet, Boseman used his own pay to even up their salaries. In 2019 he was announced as a castmember for Netflix's 5 Bloods, directed by Spike Lee, and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, directed by George C. Wolfe.   

Chadwick Boseman kept his 2016 colon cancer diagnosis private until his death in August 2020. He supported cancer charities extensively in the intervening years as he continued to act despite his condition. He began dating singer Taylor Simone Ledward in 2015 and the couple was engaged in October 2019. They married in secret, only revealing this after his death. He received a posthumous Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture, and four nominations at the 27th Annual Screen Actor's Guild Awards for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and 5 Bloods - the most ever for a performer at a single ceremony. He will posthumously reprise the role of T'Challa/Black Panther in Disney's animated show What If...?, for which he recorded numerous episodes before passing away.

Sources: IMDB, Wikipedia, The List, Empire, The Playlist

This article was updated on April 1, 2021 by Poppy O'Neill

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