In 1997, early in the first season of HBO’s prison drama, Oz, an unknown actor took to a stage in a fictional cafeteria and delivered a full throated, spellbinding poem in the “Slam” style.

For seven episodes, the character had said little, but over the course of the next two minutes, muMs Da Schemer seized his chance as Arnold “Poet” Jackson, with Kidnap The President’s Wife Without A Plan.

The show’s producers quickly gave the character more of a role and “Poet” survived all six seasons — a rarity in the series — spiralling down into addiction, murder and gang life, but giving key commentary with poetry.

Craig O’Neil Grant died in March while taking a break in Wilmington, North Carolina, during a break in filming the Starz series Hightown, in which he had a recurring role.

At the time of his death, he was scheduled to travel to Atlanta to finish Tyler Perry’s BET+ series All the Queen’s Men.

According to The New York Times, his manager, Sekka Scher said the cause was complications of diabetes. He was 52.

Born in New York City to two Bermudians, Samuel “Brownie” and Theresa Grant, née Maxwell, he explored poetry, rap and hip hop, often returning to the stage between jobs.

Mr Grant, or “muMs Da Schemer or just plain muMs” was proud of his roots, telling a Royal Gazette reporter, in his typically cryptic way: “I’m Bermudian, I know what Number 2 at Admiralty House is.”

His parents are understood to have left Bermuda for the Bronx in the 1960s.

Mr Grant’s father was a locksmith and carpenter at a hospital, and Mrs Grant was a teacher.

He is survived by his partner, Jennie West and a brother in New York, and two sisters in Bermuda.

He was the nephew of journalist Ira Philip and cousin of current Independent Senator Michelle Simmons.

Mr Grant competed at the 1996 National Poetry Slam as a member of the Nuyorican team and was featured in the 1998 feature documentary Slam Nation: The Sport of Spoken Word.

He took memorable turns in the early seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam.

While the rap career went nowhere, he began performing spoken-word poetry at places like the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, which is where someone involved in developing Oz saw him and recommended that Tom Fontana, the show’s creator, give him a look. Mr Grant auditioned by performing one of his poems.

In the years since Oz wrapped in 2002, he returned to his poetry/rap roots often, and was a member of the LAByrinth Theatre Company in New York, where he performed at colleges and small theatres all over the United States.

In LAByrinth’s A Sucker Emcee, he told his life story largely in rhymed couplets while a D.J. working turntables provided a soundtrack.

On Broadway, Mr Grant took part in the annual The 24 Hours Plays four times during the 2000s.

Mr Grant took roles on several series, including Hack, Boston Legal and the Law & Order franchise.

Other credits include The Sopranos, Chappelle’s Show, Law & Order, Boston Legal, Cold Case, Blue Bloods, Nurse Jackie, Luke Cage, High Maintenance and The Last OG.

He also had a recurring role as Cash Jackson on the 2017-19 Netflix’s She’s Gotta Have It.

He recently wrapped a role in Steven Soderbergh’s No Sudden Move, starring Jon Hamm, Benicio Del Toro and Don Cheadle.

His other film credits include Monsters and Men, Breaking Point, The Good Heart, Ball Don’t Lie, Interview and Dark Water.

He performed in director Spike Lee’s Bamboozled in 2000 and was featured in the 1998 documentary SlamNation as part of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe’s slam team.

“Before hip-hop,” as he put it in A Sucker Emcee, “I couldn’t speak.”

“I love words,” he told The Indianapolis Star in 2001. “Anybody ever wanted to buy me anything for Christmas or my birthday, they can buy me a dictionary. The bigger, the better.”

As he became a fixture in the New York performance scene, still had a youthful lisp, he told The Philadelphia Daily News in 2003, and a friend suggested he call himself “Mumbles”.

“I thought about that for a week and shortened it to muMs,” he said, and then turned that into an acronym for “manipulator under Manipulation shhhhhhh!”.

That phrase, he told the Indianapolis paper, symbolised the notion that “as great as I want to become or as great as I think I am, I can always go to the edge of the ocean, stand there and realise I’m nothing in comparison to the universe”.

Mr Grant graduated from Mount Saint Michael Academy in the Bronx and was taking college courses in Virginia when, he said, he started exploring writing, seeking to infuse poetry with the energy of rapping.

“The problem with poetry is, a lot of the audience sometimes has a short attention span. So poetry has to have rhythm to capture people who can’t listen for so long. They’ll just close their eyes and ride the rhythm of your words.”

In 2003 Mr Grant released a spoken-word album called Strange Fruit, taking the title from the song about lynchings famously recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939.

“Today, ‘strange fruit’ means we’re the product of everything Black people have been through in this country — Middle Passage, Jim Crow, segregation,” he told The Baltimore Sun in 2004. “It’s a new way of looking at it. The metaphor of strange fruit means life and birth for me, where it used to mean lynching and death. Blacks have been doing that for years, taking the bad and flipping it, making the best of a bad situation.”

His longtime representatives Ellipsis Entertainment Group, Headline Talent Agency, and Ellis Talent Group said in a joint statement: “We are heartbroken over the loss of one of the most genuine, caring, loving souls we have ever had the pleasure of representing, Craig was more than our client, he was our dear friend. We all just lost a phenomenal man.”