Courtney B. Vance is an American actor. He formerly starred as a regular in the NBC television series Law & Order: Criminal Intent as Ron Carver.
Vance was born in Detroit, Michigan. He attended Detroit Country Day School, a fee-paying university-preparatory school, and later graduated from Harvard with a bachelor of arts degree and the Yale School of Drama with a Master of Fine Arts degree. While attending Harvard, Vance was already working as an actor at the Boston Shakespeare Company. He went on to earn two Tony Award nominations, each in Tony Award-winning productions. He was first nominated for his role in August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Fences and later for his lead role in John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation.
Vance's feature-film roles have won him steady praise. His early credits include Hamburger Hill, The Hunt for Red October, and The Last Supper. 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 the independent film 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.
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
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