Bonisile John Kani was born on 30 August 1943 and is a South African actor, author, director and playwright.
15 Facts About John Kani
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John Kani is known for portraying T'Chaka in the Marvel Cinematic Universe films Captain America: Civil War and Black Panther, Rafiki in the 2019 remake of The Lion King and Colonel Ulenga in the Netflix film Murder Mystery.
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In 1975, after appearing in Athol Fugard's anti-apartheid play Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, which he co-wrote, in the United States, John Kani returned to South Africa.
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John Kani's left eye was lost as a result of the incident and he now wears a prosthesis which is technically a glass eye.
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John Kani's son Atandwa is an actor, who made his debut on US television on the CW series Life Is Wild, and played a younger version of Kani's character T'Chaka in Black Panther.
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John Kani joined The Serpent Players in Port Elizabeth in 1965 and helped to create many plays that went unpublished but were performed to a resounding reception.
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John Kani's work has been widely performed around the world, including New York, where he and Winston Ntshona won a Tony Award in 1975 for Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island.
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Chadwick Boseman 8.
In 1987 John Kani played Othello in a performance of William Shakespeare's play of the same name in South Africa, which was still under apartheid.
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John Kani starred as T'Chaka in the Marvel Studios blockbusters Captain America: Civil War and Black Panther.
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The fact that John Kani was a Xhosa native speaker led Chadwick Boseman, who played his onscreen son T'Challa, to make that Wakanda's language, and to learn whole scenes in Xhosa, although he had never studied the language before.
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In 2019, John Kani appeared in the Netflix film Murder Mystery where he played Colonel Ulenga.
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On 20 February 2010, John Kani received a SAFTA Life Time award.
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John Kani has received the Avanti Hall of Fame Award from the South African film, television, and advertising industries, an M-Net Plum award and a Clio award in New York.
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John Kani was voted 51st in the Top 100 Great South Africans in 2004.
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In 2016 John Kani received the national honour of the Order of Ikhamanga in Silver, for his "Excellent contributions to theatre and, through this, the struggle for a non-racial, non-sexist and democratic South Africa".