by Andre Braugher, who has died aged 61, gained international recognition for playing intense big-city police detectives in the television drama Homicide: Life on the Street and later in a comedy, Brooklyn Nine-Nine; He was also an award-winning stage actor who played many of Shakespeare’s great roles.
Braugher was a cerebral and charismatic performer, an actor’s actor, admired by his colleagues and by those who wrote roles for him. His breakthrough role as Detective Frank Pembleton in Homicide made him first among equals in an exceptional cast.
One of the show’s creators, David Simon, upon learning of Braugher’s death after a brief illness, said: “I have worked with many wonderful actors. I will never work with a better one.”
Frank Pembleton was the owner of the interrogation room, “the Box,” and what Braugher brought to the role was a single-minded focus on obtaining the truth by any cunning and psychological means necessary. This determination was a quality that Braugher possessed in real life.
Andre Keith Braugher was born in Chicago on July 1, 1962 and grew up in the tough Austin neighborhood on the city’s West Side. His father was a heavy equipment operator for the state and his mother worked for the United States Postal Service.
In that type of environment, the stability of two salaries provided an advantage in getting out of the ghetto. Braugher was privately educated at St Ignatius College Prep, a Jesuit institution, and earned a scholarship to Stanford University to study mathematics.
He would later tell the New York Times: “We lived in a ghetto. He could have pretended he was tough or tough and not square… It’s pretty clear that some people want out and some people don’t. “I wanted to get out.”
At Stanford, however, he chanced to play the role of Claudius in a student production of Hamlet, and immediately knew that acting was what he wanted to do with his life. His father was against the idea and he had no qualms about telling his son what he thought of that decision.
But Andre was not swayed: he eventually won his father’s round, graduated from Stanford with a degree in theater, and then earned a place in Juilliard’s theater division, an American equivalent of Rada.
After graduating, he was almost immediately cast in director Edward Zwick’s Glory, a film based on the true story of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, an African-American unit, in the American Civil War. Braugher played Robert Searles, a bookish, bespectacled friend of the unit’s white commander, Robert Gould Shaw.
Glory’s cast included established African-American stars Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman, but Braugher still caught the attention of critics and filmmakers, even though her role was small and financed.
He went through a period where he turned down jobs because he thought most of the roles he was offered were ghetto stereotypes. He was then cast as Pembleton in Homicide, which debuted in 1993.
The writers based part of the character on Braugher’s own biography. Pembleton graduated from a Jesuit high school and has the same no-nonsense, pull-your-own-bootstraps attitude the actor grew up with.
From the beginning he brought an edginess and complexity that exploded on the small screen (and at that time television screens were still comparatively small).
The show’s visual rhythm, of quick cuts alternating with magnified documentary-style long takes, magnified its ability to live in the moment of the scene. His close-up eyes made long speeches unnecessary, according to showrunner Tom Fontana. In 1998 he won the Emmy for Best Lead Actor in a Series.
With his star rising on network television, Braugher took time during Homicide’s annual production hiatus to return to the stage, frequently appearing in productions at the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park. He won an Obie, the highest acting award off-Broadway, for his performance as Henry V. His other Shakespeare roles include Iago and Angelo in Measure for Measure.
Despite all the praise, his film career never quite took off. He may have been too cerebral or not Denzel Washington-esque handsome enough. Or it could be his determination again. He lived with his family in the New Jersey suburbs of New York City, not Los Angeles. Movie stardom rarely finds those who live most of the year in Jersey.
But Braugher never stopped working in television. He appeared on House as Hugh Laurie’s psychiatrist, Dr. Darryl Nolan. The show, about a genius medical diagnostician who is also addicted to an opioid painkiller, was the vehicle for Laurie to become a star in the US, and in their scenes together, Braugher’s professionalism shined through.
He didn’t try to steal the spotlight from his British counterpart, but he stood his ground. The couple’s scenes together are a masterclass in give and take, reacting and listening, which define good acting.
Starting in 2013, Braugher reached a new audience with the hit comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine. His character, Captain Raymond Holt, leads the police station’s detective team and is in many ways an echo of Frank Pembleton, except that he is gay and also extremely funny. Braugher saw the role as completing a circle in his life that had begun with Homicide.
It’s hard to say what the next circle might have been. He was always focused exclusively on his family. In 2020, she told Variety: “It’s been an interesting career, but I think it could have been bigger. I think it could have covered more disciplines: directing, producing and all those other different things. But it would have been at the expense of my own life.”
Andre Braugher married actress Ami Brabson in 1991, who survives him with their three children.
Andre Braugher, born July 1, 1962, died December 11, 2023
