Comedian Bernie Mac died 9 August 2008 of complications from pneumonia. Born Bernard Jeffrey McCollough on 5 October 1957 in Chicago, Illinois, he was a reluctant television star after finding success in his chosen field: stand-up comedy.
Mac knew he was to be a comedian from the age of 5, as he said in a 2001 interview. He saw his mother crying in front of the television when Bill Cosby appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. When Cosby began telling a story about snakes in a bathroom, she started laughing despite herself. “When I saw her laughing, I told her that I was going to be a comedian so she’d never cry again.” HIs mother died of cancer when he was 16. After high school, he worked a variety of odd jobs and worked on his comedy, playing clubs no one else wanted to work. He was laid off from General Motors in 1983, and the same year, contracted sarcoidosis (an immune system disorder that affects the lungs). As a comedian, he cuaght the attention of Redd Foxx and Slappy White, who invited him to perform in Las Vegas in 1989. The following year, he won the Miller Lite Comedy Search, and joined the Def Comedy Jam toure.
His angry, insulting, and foul-mouthed comedy won him roles in several movies, but wasn’t sanguine about moving to television, saying “The people come to see you, the person they fell in love with. But when they see you on television, you become a whole other character, another person, and they become disappointed, and I wasn’t going to allow that to happen to me.” But he took roles on television, and in 2001, he debuted in Fox’s The Bernie Mac Show, which ran for five years.
Mac’s only genre performance was in Transformers (2007).
He is survived by his wife, Rhonda (who had been his high school sweetheart), their daughter, Je’Niece, and a grandddaughter.