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Charles Fuller, Award-Winning Playwright, Dead at 83

Charles Fuller Photo: Walter McBride/Getty Images

Charles Fuller, the decorated playwright and screenwriter behind A Soldier’s Play, died of natural causes on October 3 in Toronto. He was 83. “It’s with a heavy heart that I inform you of the passing of my Dad, Charles Fuller this morning,” Fuller’s son David wrote on Facebook. “Please keep my family in prayer.” His wife, Claire Prieto-Fuller, confirmed the news in a statement to Vulture. Born in 1939 in Philadelphia, Fuller attended Villanova University for two years before joining the U.S. Army in 1959. After tours in Japan and South Korea, he left the armed services and earned a doctorate of fine arts from La Salle University in 1967, laying the groundwork for a career that unabashedly depicted the experiences of Black families and soldiers in America.

Although Fuller wrote several plays for Henry Street Settlement and the Negro Ensemble Company, it wasn’t until The Brownsville Raid (1976) — a story that concerns an altercation between Black soldiers and white civilians in Texas at the dawn of the 20th century — that he received significant recognition. He won his first Obie Award in 1980 for Zooman and the Sign, a play that traces one family’s fight for justice after the murder of a 12-year-old Black girl on her own front porch. The Edgar- and Pulitzer Prize–winning A Soldier’s Play premiered in 1981, starring a young Denzel Washington, and was later adapted into the film A Soldier’s Story, which earned Fuller an Oscar nomination, among other accolades. Fuller won a Tony Award for the influential work in 2020, nearly 40 years after its premiere. The play is currently being adapted into a limited TV series.

David Alan Grier, an actor who appeared in both the 2020 Broadway revival of A Soldier’s Play and its film adaptation, remembered the late award-winning playwright in a tweet. “Rest n Peace Charles Fuller author of A Soldiers Play and the Oscar nominated screenplay of A Soldiers Story,” he wrote. “Pulitzer Prize recipient and amazing and wonderful artist. It has been my greatest honour to perform his words on both stage and screen, his genius will be missed 🙏🏾🕊.”

Charles Fuller, Award-Winning Playwright, Dead at 83