Career
Vance has earned 2 Tony Award nominations, each in Tony Award-winning productions. He was nominated for his role in August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Fences and for his lead role in John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation. In 1987, he won a Clarence Derwent Award for his role as Cory Maxson in Fences.
Prior to joining the cast of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Vance appeared on the original Law & Order series twice: in a minor role in the first-season episode "By Hooker, By Crook", and in a major role in the fifth season episode "Rage".
His feature film roles have won him praise. His early credits include Hamburger Hill, The Hunt for Red October, The Last Supper, Dangerous Minds, and The Adventures of Huck Finn. More recently, he appeared in Robert Altman's Cookie's Fortune, Penny Marshall's The Preacher's Wife, and in Clint Eastwood's Space Cowboys. Vance also starred in Love and Action in Chicago, a romantic comedy which he also co-produced. Vance played Black Panther Bobby Seale in the Melvin and Mario Van Peebles docudrama Panther. In 2008 and 2009, he guest starred in the final season of ER, alongside his wife Angela Bassett. He was also in Hurricane Season.
Vance's television credits include such cable movies as:
- Blind Faith (opposite Charles S. Dutton), for which he received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Actor in 1999)
- The 1997 William Friedkin-directed 12 Angry Men (with Jack Lemmon, George C. Scott and Ossie Davis)
- The Hallmark presentation The Boys Next Door (alongside Nathan Lane, Tony Goldwyn, and Michael Jeter)
- The Tuskegee Airmen (with Laurence Fishburne and Andre Braugher)
- The television production of August Wilson's play The Piano Lesson
- The Affair, for which he received a 1996 CableACE Award nomination as Best Actor
- The Showtime presentation Whitewash: The Clarence Brandley Story
- Guest starred in ER as Russell Banfield, Dr. Catherine Banfield's husband.
- Voiced several ex-slave narratives in Unchained Memories, aired on HBO in February 2003.
On December 2, 2008, TV Guide reported that Vance has been cast as the Los Angeles bureau chief of the FBI in the new ABC pilot FlashForward, which is based on a Robert J. Sawyer novel, and is said to be a possible “companion show” to Lost. In 2011, he starred in the American horror film Final Destination 5. Vance is set for the lead in the German-American apocalypse thriller The Divide.
He is also in a Disney Channel Original Movie titled Let It Shine, where he plays the Pastor Jacob Debarge, the main character's father. Also starring in this film is Tyler James Williams, Trevor Jackson, Coco Jones, Brandon Mychal Smith, and Dawnn Lewis. This will be the third time Vance portrays a pastor in a motion picture (first being The Preacher's Wife and the second being Joyful Noise).
Vance has also provided the voiceover for the National Football League's "You Want the NFL, Go to the NFL" television spots.
He appeared as Chief Tommy Delk on the TNT series, The Closer from 2010 to 2011 (Season 6-7).
Read more about this topic: Courtney B. Vance
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