Boyz n The Hood director John Singleton was taken off life support on Monday. His family made the difficult announcement earlier after inaccurate reports of his death had been surfacing.
“It is with heavy hears we announce that our beloved son, father and friend, John Daniel Singleton will be taken off life support today. This was an agonizing decision, one that our family made, over a number of days, with the careful counsel of John’s doctors,” began the statement released by John’s family.
Over the weekend, reports were surfacing that the 51-year old had dies following a stroke he suffered almost two weeks ago. However, Singleton’s publicist quickly shut down those rumors reporting that the producer was unfortunately still in a coma. However, on Monday, his death at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center was confirmed after the family pulled him off life support.
Aaron Rapoport/Corbis, via Getty Images
(Pictured above) When Boyz N the Hood was nominated for a best-director Academy Award, Singleton became the first African American nominee in that category, as well as the youngest. The movie sold more than $123 million in tickets.
See an excerpt from Boyz N the Hood below.
Singleton lost the 1992 Academy Award for best director to Jonathan Demme, who for “Silence of the Lambs”. No black film maker has won the Oscar for best director, but when Spike Lee won this year for best adapted screenplay for “BlacKkKlansman”, John Singleton was super excited. “My brother Spike Lee just won his first Oscar,” Singleton wrote on his Twitter, “I’m so happy!”
John Singleton was born on Jan 6, 1968, in the trenches of a violent Los Angeles neighborhood. His mom, Sheila Ward, was a pharmacutical sales executive, and his father, Danny Singleton, was a mortgage broker. He lived full time with his mother until he turned 11 and then moved in with his father, on whom he based the character of Tre’s fatheer (played by Laurence Fishburne) in ‘Boyz N The Hood‘. John was influenced by movies like Cooley High (1975), a comedy drama about high school friends living in a Chicago projects, directed by Michael Schultz and starring Glynn Turman and Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs.
Singleton Had a Love For Theater At A Young Age
Singleton was only 7 years old when he saw the film with his mother. He remembered that she cried when a character in the movie was killed.
“I looked at my mother and said, “Why are you crying?”, he said in a 2016 interview with Vanity Fair. “And she said, ‘Because it’s such a good movie.’ So I start thinking, when I get to make a movie; I got to make people cry. I got to make them feel something.”
And that he absolutely did, with Boyz n Hood, Highter Learning they made you feel the passion of the characters. The movies made you think deeper than the surface level.
Mr. Singleton had a big family and leaves behind his loving parents; his daughters Justice Singleton, Hadar Busia-Singleton, Cleopatra Singleton; Selenesol Singleton and Isis Singleton; and his sons Maasai and Seven. Thank you Mr. Singleton. You were truly great, an inspiration and a rising star.