Andre Braugher, the actor best known for his iconic television roles as big-city police officers—including an egotistical detective on Homicide: Life on the Street and a stone-faced captain on Brooklyn Nine-Nine—died on Monday. He was 61.
Deadline was the first to report that Braugher had died following a brief unspecified illness. His longtime rep, Jennifer Allen, subsequently confirmed his death to The Hollywood Reporter and Variety.
Braugher won his first Emmy for his work on NBC’s Homicide as the self-aggrandizing Frank Pembleton, a detective whose knack for solving cases is matched only by his abrasiveness. A fan favorite over the gritty show’s first six seasons, Pembleton proved to be Braugher’s breakout role.
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“The show began as an ensemble piece,” showrunner Tom Fontana told The New York Times in 2014. “And it became The Andre Braugher Show.”
“All the writers wanted to write for him because he was great and because they wanted to see if they could screw him up, throw him off his game.” They never could.
Braugher would depart the show in 1998, but returned to appear in its 2000 television film that served as the series’ finale.
David Simon, who wrote the book on which Homicide was based, mourned the actor’s loss on Tuesday. “Andre Braugher,” he tweeted. “God. I’ve worked with a lot of wonderful actors. I’ll never work with one better.”
His other Emmy win came from playing a master criminal in the 2006 FX mini-series Thief; he would go on to earn a total of 11 Emmy nominations over the course of his three-decade career.
In 2013, Braugher introduced himself to a new generation of television viewers through the procedural comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Captain Raymond Holt’s deadpan, robotic delivery—punctuated by occasional staccato bursts of emotion that proved to be instant meme fodder—won him instant acclaim and scored him another four Emmy nominations.
“And that voice,” co-star Joe Lo Truglio wrote in an Instagram tribute on Tuesday. “It laid anchor to the roughest of dialogue.”
Braugher saw his role on the show as that of the perennial foil, the string that kept the “kite from flying away,” as he told the Times. He may have been the show’s straight man, but Captain Holt was also beloved as an openly gay character.
His sexuality was never the butt of the joke, but it also provided ample material for some of the show’s best lines. (“You know what the toughest part about being a gay Black police officer is? The discrimination. I believe that is what you call observational humor.”)
Playing Holt—a character who loved nothing more than balloon arches, the “no-nonsense” color beige, and his corgi, Cheddar—was a deliberate and delicious twist on his drama-heavy early career.
A Juilliard-trained actor, Braugher was a classical theater veteran who worked many times with the New York Shakespeare Festival, including in 1996, when he won an Obie Award for playing the titular monarch in the Public Theater’s outdoor summer production of Henry V. Reviewers at the time hailed his assured, commanding performance (as well as his dapper red pocket square).
He also starred in the TNT drama Men of a Certain Age, and had recurring roles on shows like Gideon’s Crossing, Hack, House, M.D., Law & Order: SVU, and Last Resort.
His next project was set to have been Netflix’s The Residence, which only shot four of its planned eight episodes before the Hollywood writers’ strike shut down production earlier this year.
The series had been set to resume filming on Jan. 2, sources told Deadline. Its fate on Tuesday was not immediately clear.
Braugher is survived by his wife, Ami Brabson, whom he met on the set of Homicide, their three sons, and his mother.
Nothing was more important to Braugher than his family, he told Variety in a 2020 profile. “I made a choice along the way that Ami and those boys were too important to not spend quantity time with,” he said, adding that he’d made a conscious choice “to sort of drop out” of the celebrity rat-race.
He was aware that he might have inadvertently knee-capped his career by turning his focus back home. “It’s been an interesting career, but I think it could have been larger. I think it could have spanned more disciplines: directing, producing, all these other different things,” Braugher said.
“But it would have been at the expense of my own life.”
The family is asking for donations to the Classical Theatre of Harlem in lieu of flowers, according to Deadline.
