Bernie Mac has died at the age of 50, nine days after being hospitalized with pneumonia. (Since 1983, Mac had suffered from sarcoidosis, a tissue inflammation condition that may have contributed to his pneumonia.) In recent years, the baleful-eyed Mac had finally begun enjoying the full rewards of a long career that began as a stand-up comedian in the late 1970s. From his Chicago home base, he plugged away relentlessly for more than a decade before winning the Miller Lite Comedy Search at 32, which turned him into an overnight success a dozen years in the making. He made his big screen debut in a small role in 1992's Mo' Money, one of the movies that helped to relieve Damon Wayans of his film career. Through the 1990s, he also turned up in Who's the Man?, Friday, and Spike Lee's Get on the Bus, as well as the HBO TV movie Don King: Only in America, where he played Muhammad Ali's faithful sidekick Bundini Brown. But it was probably his appearances on HBO's Def Comedy Jam that did the most to bring his face and name to a national audience.
His real breakthrough came with the stand-up touring party known as the Original Kings of Comedy, which played to packed houses around the country without getting a lot of attention outside the African-American media outlets, and the resulting concert film (again directed by Lee), which gave white audiences a taste of what they'd been missing. Awarded the concluding segment in a film that also featured routines by his fellow self-crowned kings Steve Harvey, D. L. Hughley, and Cedric the Entertainer, Mac delivered a scaldingly funny, personal set that ended the film with a bang and set Hollywood directors to reaching for their cell phones. He appeared in all three of the Soderbergh-Clooney Danny Ocean films, went cussword to cussword against Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa (a movie whose theatrical version was slightly recut because the audience was freaked out over seeing Mac brutally murdered, even though he was playing a bad guy), stepped in the replace Bill Murray in the sequel to Charlie's Angels, and starred as an arrogant superstar baseball player in the underrated Mr. 3000. The last movie performances of his to reach the screen in his lifetime were last year's Pride, lending support to Terrence Howard's heroic swimming coach, and Transformers, where he had a cameo as a used-car salesman. His best screen work, though, may have been on the Fox sitcom The Bernie Mac Show, which, especially in its early seasons, drew on Mac's own complicated sense of the meaning of family and his surprisingly delicate touch as an actor to bring some fresh new tones to the domestic comedy genre. One of the yet-to-be-released films that he had in the pipeline, Nothing but the Truth, the Whole Truth, So Help Me Mac, is a concert film that he meant to serve as his kiss-off to the grueling profession that made his stardom possible. Last year, Mac--who leaves behind a wife, Rhonda McCullough, who he married in 1977, as well as a daughter, Je'Niece, and a granddaughter, Jasmine-- announced his official retirement from stand-up comedy. (He made an exception for Barack Obama earlier this summer. In 2003, Mac himself had played the running mate of a black presidential candidate--Chris Rock--in the comedy Head of State.) "I want to enjoy my life a little bit," he said. "I missed a lot of things, you know"