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Actor Andre Braugher, who starred as a Baltimore Police detective in the television series “Homicide: Life on the Street,” has died at age 61.
Variety reported Braugher’s passing on Tuesday, saying it happened after a brief illness. The magazine did not give a cause of death.
Braugher, a Chicago native, played Detective Frank Pembleton on the Baltimore-based series starting in 1993 and staying on for six seasons. The role was one of a self-righteous, intense, Jesuit-educated, hard-charging homicide detective known for his work interrogating suspects.
The show was based on the book “Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets” by former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon, who spent 1988 as a police intern with the department. Baltimore native Barry Levinson was the executive producer of “Homicide.”
Simon, posting on X, said, “I‘ve worked with a lot of wonderful actors. I’ll never work with one better. Stunned and thinking of Ami and his sons and so many memories of this good man that are now a blessing. But too damn soon.”
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Tom Fontana, a writer and producer who worked on “Homicide,” remembered Braugher’s love for Baltimore’s unique neighborhoods.
“Like his ‘Homicide’ character Frank Pembleton, Andre was not a native of Baltimore, but he took to the town from the minute he arrived to start filming,” said Fontana in an email. “He loved the different and diverse neighborhoods where we’d be shooting and, while talking to the locals, he’d absorb everything Bawlmer with his unique style and grace.”
Braugher won Television Critics Association awards for individual achievement in drama in 1997 and 1998 for his role as Pembleton. He was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series in 1996 and 1998. He won the award in 1998.
He would win his second for lead actor in a miniseries or movie for the 2006 limited series “Thief” on FX. Braugher would be nominated for 11 Emmys overall.
After leaving “Homicide,” Braugher said he feared being typecast after embodying the outsized role for multiple years.
“If I do it too long then I’ll stop really searching and probing inside my own work,″ he told The Associated Press in 1998. “That’s just a great danger. I think I’m going to escape that trap, and get an opportunity to do some work that will be more challenging for me.”
After leaving “Homicide,” Braugher took on the role of Capt. Ray Holt on the police procedural comedy series “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” from 2013 until 2021.
With the role of Holt being a comedic one, it marked a shift for Braugher, who was known for more serious characters such as that of Pembleton.
“I just felt as though it was an opportunity to do something strikingly different from the rest of my career,” Braugher told The Associated Press. “I like it because it just simply opens up my mind and forces me to think in a different way. So, I think I’ve become much more sort of supple as an actor, and more open to the incredible number of possibilities of how to play a scene.”
He also appeared in the Civil War-era epic “Glory” with Matthew Broderick, Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington, who won an Oscar for his role depicting a member of an all-Black Union Army regiment, and later roles in the movies “City of Angels,” “Frequency” and “Poseidon.”
He was married for more than 30 years to his “Homicide” co-star Ami Brabson. They had three sons.
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Brett Barrouquere is an editor on the Express Desk, handling breaking news.
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