Rest in Peace: Chadwick Boseman

Actor Chadwick Boseman passed away yesterday. As an outsider, I was stunned; I thought he had many more years of movies to make. Evidently he had been suffering from colon cancer for some time, but kept it from the public.

As his best-known role was King T'Challa, the Black Panther, I can't help but connect Boseman's sense of privacy to that of T'Challa. When Christopher Priest wrote his story "The Death of the Black Panther", he wrote T'Challa (suffering from an aneurysm) as concealing his health problems from all of his close confidants. It's the way of the stoic -- and perhaps of the public figure who wants to preserve a few ounces of their personal identity.

I've always seen Priest's T'Challa as the definitive version and Boseman's interpretation wasn't entirely the same - Boseman's T'Challa was a little warmer and more humane than the cold statemsn who Priest wrote. Perhaps Boseman's Panther would be better likened to Don McGregor's -- a vital and earnest man.

Outside of his appearances as T'Challa, the only performance of Boseman's I've seen is the film 42, where he played Jackie Robinson. I liked that movie quite a bit. It's sad that his life was cut so short; he was only a year older than me. Carpe diem.

He passed away on the birthday of the Black Panther's creator, Jack Kirby. It was also baseball's Jackie Robinson Day.