*Don Cheadle will follow up last year’s Miles Davis biopic with a project that sheds light on another real life hero of cultural significance.
The actor will star in and produce “Prince of Darkness,” a biopic of 19th Century black millionaire Jeremiah G. Hamilton, reports Variety.
Steven Baigelman, who co-wrote the “Miles Ahead” screenplay with Cheadle, has been tapped to adapt the “Prince of Darkness” script from Shane White’s book “Prince of Darkness: The Story of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Wall Street’s First Black Millionaire.”
The book paints Hamilton as a larger-than-life character who defied convention during the period and amassed a $2 million fortune by the time of his death in 1875. He dealt extensively in the white business world, married a white woman, bought a mansion in rural New Jersey, and owned railroad stock on trains he was not legally allowed to ride.
When Hamilton died, he was often referred to as the richest black man in the U.S.
White’s book was the winner of the 2015 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Best Book Prize.
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