Andre Braugher, actor who played memorable detectives in Homicide and Brooklyn Nine-Nine– obituary

Andre Braugher, who has died aged 61, gained international recognition for playing intense big-city police detectives in the television drama Homicide: Life on the Street and later a comedy, Brooklyn Nine-Nine; was also an award-winning stage actor who played many of the great Shakespearean roles.

Braugher, was a cerebral and charismatic performer, the actor’s actor,  held in awe by his colleagues and by those who wrote parts for him. His breakthrough role as Detective Frank Pembleton in Homicide made him first among equals in an outstanding ensemble.

One of the show’s creators, David Simon, said on learning of Braugher’s death after a short illness: “I’ve worked with a lot of wonderful actors. I’ll never work with one better.”

Frank Pembleton was the master of the interrogation room, “the Box”, and what Braugher brought to the part was a single-minded focus on eliciting the truth by whatever cunning, psychological means necessary. This single-mindedness was a quality Braugher possessed in real life.

Andre Keith Braugher was born in Chicago on July 1 1962 and grew up in the rough Austin neighbourhood on the city’s West Side. His father was a heavy-equipment operator for the state and his mother worked for the US Postal Service.

In that kind of environment, two-wage stability provided a leg-up out of the ghetto. Braugher was educated privately at St Ignatius College Prep, a Jesuit institution, and earned a scholarship to Stanford University to study mathematics.

Braugher as Raymond Holt with Melissa Fumero in Brooklyn Nine-Nine – NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

He would later tell The New York Times: “We lived in a ghetto. I could have pretended I was hard or tough and not a square … It’s pretty clear that some people want to get out and some people don’t. I wanted out.”

At Stanford, however, by chance he stepped into the role of Claudius in a student production of Hamlet, and immediately knew that acting was what he wanted to do with his life. His father was against the idea and was not shy about telling his son just what he thought of that decision.

But Andre would not be swayed: eventually he won his father round, graduated Stanford with a BA in theatre then gained a place in the drama division at the Juilliard, an American equivalent to Rada.

Upon graduation he was almost immediately cast in the director Edward Zwick’s Glory, a film-based on the true story of the 54th Massachussetts Regiment, an African-American unit, in the American Civil War. Braugher played Robert Searles, a bookish, bespectacled friend of the white commander of the unit, Robert Gould Shaw.

The cast of Glory included the established African-American stars Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman, but Braugher still caught the eye of critics and filmmakers, even though his part was small and underwritten.

He went through a period of turning down work because he thought most of the parts he was being offered were ghetto stereotypes. Then he was cast as Pembleton in Homicide, which debuted in 1993.

The writers based part of the character on Braugher’s own biography. Pembleton is a graduate of a Jesuit secondary school and has some of the same no-nonsense, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps attitude with which the actor was raised.

From the beginning he brought an edginess and complexity that exploded off the small screen (and at that time television screens were stil comparatively small).

The show’s visual rhythm of rapid cutting alternating with long, hand-held documentary-style takes magnified his ability to live in the moment of the scene. His eyes in close-ups made long speeches unnecessary, according to the show-runner Tom Fontana. In 1998 he won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Series.

With his star ascending on network television, Braugher took time during Homicide’s annual production hiatus he returned to the stage, appearing frequently in productions at the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park. He won an Obie, the top off-Broadway acting award, for his performance as Henry V. Among his other Shakespearean parts were Iago and Angelo in Measure for Measure.

As Dr Noland with Hugh Laurie as Dr Gregory House in House – Michael Yarish/NBCU Photo Bank

For all the kudos, his film career never quite took off. Perhaps he was a bit too cerebral or not quite handsome enough in the Denzel Washington mold. Or it could be his single-mindedness again. He lived with his family in the New Jersey suburbs of New York City, not in Los Angeles. Film stardom rarely finds those who live most of the year in Jersey.

But Braugher was never out of television work. He appeared in House as Hugh Laurie’s psychiatrist, Dr Darryl Nolan. The show, about a genius medical diagnostician who is also addicted to an opioid painkiller was Laurie’s star-making vehicle in the US, and in their scenes together Braugher’s professionalism shone through.

He did not try to steal the focus from his British counterpart, yet held his own. The pair’s scenes together are a masterclass in the give and take, reacting and listening, that define good acting.

Starting in 2013, Braugher reached a new audience with the hit comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine. His character, Captain Raymond Holt, runs the precinct’s detective squad and is in many ways an echo of Frank Pembleton, except that he is gay, and also extremely funny. Braugher saw the part as completing a circle in his life that had begun with Homicide.

What the next circle might have been is hard to say. He was always focused single-mindedly on his family. In 2020, he told Variety: “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. But it would have been at the expense of my own life.”

Andre Braugher married, in 1991, the actress Ami Brabson, who survives him with their three sons.

Andre Braugher, born July 1 1962, died December 11 2023

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