It’s the voice first. Yes, many great roles, even if our article image is from his first movie, but the voice. He narrated a lot of stuff for PBS, one of those filmographies that’s almost certainly incomplete on both IMDb and Wikipedia, and of course we’re used to that around here with PBS people. But it means that, if you had a PBS childhood like I did but are younger than I am, what you’re really thinking of is hearing him tell you in mellifluous tones about Emmett Till or the St. Francis Dam or Ralph Ellison or something.
But of course, he could act. My goodness, he could act. From what I’ve seen, he never gave a bad performance. No matter what was going on around him. It’s easy to be amazing in Glory. It’s harder to be amazing in City of Angels. That’s a mediocre movie elevated by a great soundtrack and an Andre Braugher performance. He made mediocre movies decent and good movies great. When the announcement came that he had died, there was a hint of pain from all of us.
The “brief illness” is a painful thing. We didn’t have any reason to prepare for this. Andre Braugher was not young, goodness knows, but he was too young. Those can both be true. He was 61, just three years older than my Ren faire boss. I don’t like to think of people that young dying, because it feels wrong. Starting today, we’re in a world without Andre Braugher, and that does not feel possible. There were so many roles he could have done yet to go.
When extremely talented people die, what I think of is the Life obituary where they lamented that they would never see Raul Julia play King Lear. Braugher did a lot of Shakespeare, but so far as I know, he didn’t yet do Lear, and I regret that he now never will. That would have been a beautiful, powerful performance, one for the ages.
We lost him last night. I was not in a place to write about that, but I knew that we needed to pay tribute to him. Sometimes, when people go, I let it go—sometimes on purpose, sometimes because life just says no. Andre Braugher, I needed to get to. We will miss him.