Donnie Andrews, the former Baltimore stick-up man who inspired the Omar Little character on "The Wire," died Thursday in New York City after suffering a heart attack, "The Baltimore Sun" reports. He was 58 years old.
Andrews spent his youth robbing drug dealers on the West Side of Baltimore, and served 18 years in prison on a murder charge before he was paroled in 2005. While in prison, he was introduced to a recovering heroin addict named Fran Boyd, who was the subject of the David Simon book "The Corner." That non-fiction tale of drug culture on the streets of Baltimore was adapted into an HBO miniseries of the same name that grew into "The Wire."
In an interview with "Vice" magazine, Andrews described how he came to be a character in "The Wire." "They made Omar exactly the way I was. David [Simon] wrote ‘The West Side Story’ [the initial Baltimore Sun article about Donnie] after my conviction in ’86 and they basically had everything down-pat,...
Andrews spent his youth robbing drug dealers on the West Side of Baltimore, and served 18 years in prison on a murder charge before he was paroled in 2005. While in prison, he was introduced to a recovering heroin addict named Fran Boyd, who was the subject of the David Simon book "The Corner." That non-fiction tale of drug culture on the streets of Baltimore was adapted into an HBO miniseries of the same name that grew into "The Wire."
In an interview with "Vice" magazine, Andrews described how he came to be a character in "The Wire." "They made Omar exactly the way I was. David [Simon] wrote ‘The West Side Story’ [the initial Baltimore Sun article about Donnie] after my conviction in ’86 and they basically had everything down-pat,...
- 12/14/2012
- by The Huffington Post
- Huffington Post
Khandi Alexander no longer has to talk to dead people. After six years of sweet-talking corpses as medical examiner Alexx Woods on “CSI: Miami,” the flinty, New York-born actress wanted to stop describing arterial sprays and do some real acting. So she quit the procedural, sold her house in California and planned to move back home. After her final episode aired, she got a call from an old friend — Fran Boyd, the real-life woman Alexander played in the David Simon harrowing drama, “The Corner.” “Fran said,...
- 4/11/2010
- by By ROBERT RORKE
- NYPost.com
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