Charles Porter, Producer and Actor Behind Finding Faith, Dies at 47
Charles Porter, the producer behind the 2025 film Finding Faith, has died at age 47, The Hollywood Reporter reported on 5 November 2026. He died at his home in Calabasas, California, after a 17.5-year battle with Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer that starts in the infection-fighting cells of the immune system.
Porter was born Charles Frederick Porter II on 13 March 1979 in Oxford, England. He later attended Duke University in the United States, where he earned a degree in cultural anthropology and was a four-year letterman on the football team. He moved to Los Angeles in 2002 and began working in front of the camera.
As an actor, he appeared on the television series The Parkers, House, Without a Trace and Bones. In 2011 he played racing driver Wendell Scott in the ESPN film Wendell Scott: A Race Story, a role that tied him to the sport he had followed at Duke.
Behind the camera, he founded Black Bench Productions. For the streaming service BET+, he produced A Miracle Before Christmas (2022) and Christmas Angel (2023). He was also an executive producer and early investor on Last Meals, an upcoming feature.
Finding Faith was written and directed by LazRael Lison and produced in collaboration with Summer House Pictures and Third Eye Productions. Paula Patton, Loretta Devine and Keith David starred. The film opened in cinemas through Fathom Entertainment, then aired on Lifetime. Lifetime's 2025 summer slate of faith-based films included it, and the network described its lead character, Faith, played by Patton, as someone who spirals out of control and loses trust in God after the sudden death of her husband, according to Lifetime's slate announcement in The Hollywood Reporter.
Porter's work moved between the routes that films and series take to audiences: theatrical release, cable, and streaming. His credits span holiday movies, a sports biography and a faith-based drama, and each one depended on a long run of planning, financing and casting before it reached a screen.
Colleagues and family have not been named, and no memorial details have been announced. Porter is remembered through the credits he leaves behind.
