Before Captain Holt, Andre Braugher was a Juilliard-trained Shakespearean and Emmy-winning detective
Millions knew Andre Braugher as the deadpan Captain Raymond Holt of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Long before that comedy, he had studied engineering at Stanford, trained at Juilliard, won an Obie for playing Henry V in Central Park, and taken an Emmy for the fiery detective Frank Pembleton on Homicide: Life on the Street.
Braugher grew up in Chicago's Austin neighbourhood, born on July 1, 1962, the youngest of four children of a postal worker and a heavy-equipment operator. A scholarship took him to Stanford to study engineering, but acting won him over, and he left in 1984 with a theatre degree. Juilliard's Drama Division followed, and he graduated in 1988.
His first film came straight away. In Glory (1989) he played Thomas Searles, an educated free black man from the North who enlists in the Union Army's first black regiment. Television then made his name. As Pembleton, a proud, Jesuit-schooled Baltimore detective who refused to bend, he earned Emmy nominations in 1996 and 1998, winning the second, plus back-to-back Television Critics Association awards. He left after six seasons. A second Emmy came in 2006 for the FX miniseries Thief, in which he played Nick Atwater.
The stage never let go of him. Playing the king in the 1996 Shakespeare in the Park production of Henry V brought an Obie Award, and in 2011 he starred off-Broadway in Matthew Lopez's The Whipping Man. He was also a sought-after voice, narrating PBS documentaries, introducing NBC's Olympic coverage from 2006 to 2010, and voicing the villain Darkseid in an animated Superman film.
From 2013 to 2021 he played Holt, the stern precinct captain whose flat delivery became the show's secret weapon, earning four Emmy nominations for supporting actor in a comedy. He married the actress Ami Brabson in 1991; she later played Pembleton's wife on Homicide, and they raised three sons in New Jersey. Braugher died of lung cancer on December 11, 2023, aged 61, a few months after his diagnosis. He had quit smoking in 2010. The Netflix series The Residence, which had to recast and reshoot his part after he died, was dedicated to him.
Source: Andre Braugher
