Chadwick Boseman’s widow, Simone Ledward Boseman, has said she does not want the Black Panther star’s legacy to be “distilled” down to the way he died – but rather remembered by the way he lived.
The actor, who also played singer James Brown in Get On Up (2014) and baseball star Jackie Robinson in 42 (2013), died in August 2020 aged 43, four years after being diagnosed with colon cancer.
His battle with cancer was kept private up until his death, which shocked the world after he became a global superstar as the first black superhero to lead a Marvel Cinematic Universe film in 2018’s Black Panther.
Speaking to The Guardian, Ledward Boseman said she felt a lot of pressure about deciding what his legacy would be following his death.
She said: “My response was: I’m not talking to nobody and I’m not doing nothing, which is another lesson I learned from Chad.
“He taught me that I can’t always be nice. You can always be respectful, but you can’t always be nice. He also taught me that sometimes ‘no’ is a full sentence and sometimes silence is the most eloquent response.
“I don’t have to create his legacy, I just have to protect it.
“I just have to make sure that it doesn’t get flattened. That’s why I love talking about him – I think it’s important that people understand him as a full human being, that they get the full picture of who he was.
“I never want his life story to be distilled down to the way that he died. I want his life to be about the way that he lived.”
Ledward Boseman said the first two years following his death were the most “challenging” of her life, however, she found that the “edges of grief get less sharp over time”.
She also explained why it was so important to Boseman to keep the diagnosis private, with only a couple of family members and friends knowing about it.
She said: “Something like a cancer diagnosis can get in the way of a lot of things.
“He never wanted to be treated differently. A lot of the roles he did were so physical, and he still wanted to do them.
“He did not want to be judged by what he was experiencing. He didn’t want his diagnosis to interfere with the work.”
The comments come ahead of the revival of one of Boseman’s plays, titled Deep Azure, which will run at the Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London for nine weeks.
The play, which opens on Monday, follows the aftermath of the death of an unarmed black man named Deep, after he was murdered by a police officer.
Boseman’s best known role of superhero T’Challa in Marvel’s Black Panther (2018) was not recast or digitally recreated in its sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022), with the movie reflecting his passing.
His final film was 2020’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, an adaptation of the play with the same name by August Wilson, which also starred Hollywood actress Viola Davis.
The actor was honoured in November with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, number 2,828 on the street, and was accepted by Ledward Boseman – who described him as “more than an actor”.
