Omar Little was at once the keening product of such a society and its fatal reckoning, adhering to a strict moral code and spurning profanity while doling out ominous punishment to street-level crooks and drug vendors. Set between the teeming tower blocks and dilapidated docks, the fractious police departments and grubby government offices of Baltimore, in The Wire the writer and creator David Simon diagnosed the institutional glut and creeping decay of the modern American city. Williams subsequently played a drug dealer in the Martin Scorsese picture Bringing Out the Dead, and had bit-parts in the television shows Law & Order and The Sopranos, before being cast as the stick-up man Omar Little in the crime drama The Wire. In 1996, the rapper Tupac Shakur spotted a Polaroid of Williams during pre-production for the movie Bullet, casting him as the brother and henchman of his drug kingpin Tank. The wound left Williams with a distinctive scar running slantwise from the top of his forehead past the bridge of his nose, and immediately boosted his acting and modelling opportunities while adding grit to music videos by Madonna and George Michael. The following year, Williams was celebrating his 25th birthday at a bar on Jamaica Avenue in Queens when he was slashed with a razor blade during a scuffle. He became a background dancer for the singer Kym Sims, performed on tour with Missy Elliott and Ginuwine, and provided choreography for the hit Crystal Waters single ‘100% Pure Love’ which was nominated for Best Dance Video at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards. Soon Williams was hanging around the clubs and bars of Manhattan, frequenting dance studios and record labels as he sought to embark on a career as a dancer. After battling drug addiction and piling up a record of arrests, he enrolled at the National Black Theatre in Harlem. He was raised in the Vanderveer Projects in East Flatbush and attended George Westinghouse Career and Technical Education High School, suffering early trauma when he was sexually molested as a child. Williams was born in Brooklyn to a father who hailed from South Carolina, while his mother had emigrated to the United States from the Bahamian capital of Nassau. Williams was reportedly found dead inside of his home in the Williamsburg neighbourhood of Brooklyn. Williams, the actor who became known for his spirited and sometimes harrowing rendering of the lives of marginal black men through his breakout role as Omar Little in The Wire, died on Monday at the age of 54 years old.
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