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Biography
The male Oscar nominees of 2002 were an
immensely talented and wildly varied bunch. There was the maverick
brilliance of Sean
Penn, the Shakespearian gravitas of Ian McKellen and Tom Wilkinson,
the long screen experience of Jon Voight and those precocious flavours
of the last couple of years, Will
Smith and Russell
Crowe. But, strangely, there was only one dyed-in-the-wool,
tried-and-tested Film Star: only one man with the looks of a Newman or a
Redford with an outstanding thespian ability to back those looks up:
only one man who'd been dominating big-budget movies for over a decade.
That man, of course, was Denzel Washington, accepting his fifth
nomination and, without doubt, one of the pre-eminent actors of his
generation. It came as no surprise when he was named Best Actor.
Denzel Washington was born on the 28th of December, 1954, in Mount
Vernon, at the north end of the Bronx in New York City. His father -
himself named Denzel after the Doctor Denzel who delivered him - was a
Pentecostal minister with the Church of God in Christ. His mother,
Lynne, was a beautician and former gospel singer, while there were also
an older sister, Lorice, and younger brother David. Incredibly, Denzel
Jr was unhappy with his looks from an early age, eventually getting caps
of those unsightly front gap-teeth.
He was a serious child, was Denzel, but brought up in very sociable
surroundings, spending much time listening to his mother and father, in
their own different styles, entertaining their clients at work. It's
often been said that the boy picked up his desire to act from the
flamboyant communication that went on around him at this time.
He certainly picked up a desire to work -
the family ethic was very strong - and young Denzel found himself
labouring in barber shops and beauty parlours from the age of 11. He was
also a member of the Boys' Club of America, for whom he is a leading
spokesman to this day (he's also a major supporter of the Nelson Mandela
Children's Fund, and AIDS-hospice The Gathering Place).
When Denzel was 14, he and Lorice were
sent away to boarding school. Their parents reasoned they would get a
better education but, more importantly, the kids would not be around to
witness the messy end of their marriage. Lynne now raised them herself,
and Denzel is always quick to praise her for keeping him on the straight
and narrow. Remembering his three best friends of the time, he once
explained that one was murdered, one died from AIDS-related illness,
while the third was in the middle of a 25-year stretch. And Denzel was
living like a king in Hollywood. Nice one, mum.
Denzel had considered a career as a doctor, but decided on journalism
and, as ever setting his mind to the task in hand, by 1977 he had
graduated with a BA in journalism from Fordham University. But, by then,
his focus had changed. At university, he'd stumbled into acting and
discovered both a latent talent and, probably, an escape from his
intense personality. He recalls now how his friends would often complain
about how tense and up-tight he was, how he would brood constantly. Only
when he had kids of his own, he says, did he really learn how to have
fun. So acting must have been a release and a relief - he certainly
threw himself into it. One performance, as the green-eyed,
wife-throttling Moor, is still talked about at Fordham to this day.
So, though he was actually studying to be a hack, Denzel won a
scholarship to the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. Here
he studied under the renowned Bill Ball but, after a single year, he
grew restless for work, for a real challenge (something that's characterized
his entire career). He returned to New York and was snapped up by the
famed Joseph Papp, head of the New York Shakespeare Festival. Here he
gained a strong grounding in the classics, appearing in the likes of
Coriolanus, and also gained experience off-Broadway. In one production
of Laurence Holder's When The Chickens Come Home To Roost, at the Henry
Street Theatre, he took on a role he would later reprise on the Silver
Screen - that of Malcolm X. Then, he would be Oscar-nominated; for now,
he had to be content with an Audelco award.
Conscientious and focused in all areas of his life, Denzel had worked
hard for this success. To support himself, he'd been a garbage man, he'd
worked in factories and in the post office, he'd even worked the
midnight shift at a record-processing plant. He'd suffered bad times and
hunger, keeping his unemployment book to this day to remember how it
was. And he'd worked hard at his art too, one lesson in particular
sticking in his mind: "It was instilled in me as a young
performer," he later recalled "to take chances %u2026 because
failure is a part of growth. If you're gonna fail, fail big and take
chances".
While his stage career was progressing,
Denzel had also procured several TV roles. He'd made his debut in Wilma,
about the sprinter Wilma Rudolph, who won three golds at the 1960
Olympics - Denzel playing one of her boyfriends. On-set, he met
co-performer Pauletta Pearson, an actress, singer and pianist (she'd
later appear in Beloved). The couple would marry in 1982 and have four
children - John David, Katia and twins Malcolm and Olivia - renewing
their vows in South Africa in 1995, in a ceremony officiated by
Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Onscreen, Denzel also made an appearance in the
controversial Flesh And Blood, where a mother, Suzanne Pleshette,
continually seduced her son, Tom Berenger.
Then came Denzel's big screen debut. Tellingly, considering the work
he'd do in the future, it dealt with race, but in a comic manner he
would never attempt again. In Carbon Copy, he played the teenage and
hitherto unknown son of white executive George Segal. George must try to
incorporate this surprise newcomer into his very white life, with - ahem
- hilarious consequences.
But, thankfully, it got better, and fast. Denzel returned to New York
and the stage to play in A Soldier's Story with the Negro Ensemble
Company. The play concerned a black soldier found dead outside a
military base in Louisiana. The investigation, by a black lawyer,
uncovers an extremely complicated and wholly unexpected situation.
Denzel's character, Private First Class Melvin Peterson, was
conspicuously involved somehow. And Denzel - mostly known these days as
a noble good-guy - was superb, picking up an Obie for his efforts.
Actually, he won a great deal more than that. Denzel now came to the
attention of those nice people at NBC and was cast as insecure young
resident Doctor Phillip Chandler in a new series, called St Elsewhere.
This series, concerning the daily goings-on at St Eligius Hospital, was
truly innovative, veering between bizarre humour and fraught drama - as
such it could be seen as the parent of ER, Chicago Hope and even
Northern Exposure. Starring alongside Denzel were Ed Begley Jr and
ex-football star Mark Harmon (himself also an excellent Ted Bundy), with
Helen Hunt appearing between 1984 and 1986.
The show was a storming success, and Denzel would stay for six years,
building his experience and cementing his reputation. In the meantime,
he would use his summer breaks to slowly break into movies and, cannily,
tried to pick the classiest projects he could. First came Norman
Jewison's film adaptation of A Soldier's Story, with Denzel reprising
his onstage role. Then came Sidney Lumet's Power, where Richard
Gere starred as a seemingly omnipotent political spin-doctor who
gets dragged into heavy-duty corruption. And then, in 1987, came the
breakthrough - Richard Attenborough's Cry Freedom.
Here Denzel played the part of South
African activist Steve Biko who, having inspired and influenced
journalist Donald Woods with his integrity and charisma, is then
murdered by the authorities. Woods (played by Kevin Kline) now has to
sneak out of the country if he wants to write the story and, though
white, faces the same perils as Biko. Denzel was immense as Biko and won
himself the first of his five Oscar nominations. Outrageously, he was
beaten by Sean Connery's performance in The Untouchables but, like 2002,
it was a good year for black recognition, Morgan
Freeman also receiving his first nomination, for Street Smart.
Denzel doesn't often dwell on race issues in Hollywood. "I'm very
proud to be black," he once said "but black is not all I am.
That's my cultural historical background, my genetic makeup, but it's
not all of who I am, nor is it the basis from which I answer every
question". This he proved over his next eight roles - only a couple
dealt overtly with racial politics, but ALL the roles were wildly
different from the rest. He was, quite purposefully, an actor first and
a spokesman second. Actually, maybe being a spokesman came third or
fourth, after being a husband and father.
First came The Mighty Quinn, where Denzel played a Jamaican cop whose
dodgy mate Robert Townsend (who'd earlier appeared in A Soldier's Story)
gets involved with murder and Mammon. Next, he revealed an outstanding
English accent in For Queen And Country, where he was an ex-soldier
seeking respectable work in London, only to end up as a drug dealer's
bodyguard. And then came that Oscar breakthrough - Glory.
Director Edward Zwick has said of Denzel: "Whatever that mysterious
electrochemical process is that makes the camera love someone, he has
more of it than any one person should". In Glory, it really showed.
Here Matthew Broderick played the white leader of the first company of
black volunteers in US military history, taking flak from both sides in
the American Civil War.
With very little experience, and trying
desperately to maintain some order amongst men he does not understand at
all, he struggles to discipline Denzel's rebellious Private Trip, a
soldier who openly asks why these men should fight for a Union that
views them the same way the Confederates do. Washington's was a searing
performance of rage and dignity, thrown into sharp focus by Broderick's
naïve determination and Morgan
Freeman's usual world-weary reasonableness. And Denzel won the Oscar
for Best Supporting Actor, thus placing his name on a very short list.
Hattie McDaniel, Sidney Poitier, Louis Gossett Jr, er Louis Farrakhan
might add Ben Kingsley and, er, that's about it.
After Glory came Heart Condition, where
Denzel played a slimy defence lawyer who's shot dead and has his heart
transplanted into the body of arch-enemy cop Bob Hoskins, returning to
haunt the little feller. In Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues he acted out
the tempestuous career of self-obsessed trumpet-player Bleek Gilliam.
Then came Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala where he played a young
American carpet cleaner who begins a frowned-upon affair with the
daughter of an Indian family who've just escaped Idi Amin's Uganda. In
Ricochet, he was a straight-laced assistant DA who's framed and
threatened by a sublimely beastly John Lithgow.
Next came that reprise of his early performance as Malcolm X. Again
directed by Spike Lee, Denzel was absolutely superb, capturing Malcolm
first as a young hoodlum, then as a white-hating leader of the Nation Of
Islam, on through his pilgrimage to Mecca and his conversion to
traditional Islam to his eventual assassination. It was a severely
testing role, and Denzel managed it well, from the early rage to the
later spiritual calm. He was again Oscar-nominated.
After returning to his Shakespearian roots by playing Don Pedro in
Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing, there was a string of big, big
movies. First came The Pelican Brief, where student Julia
Roberts stumbles upon the sinister truth behind the murder of two
Supreme Court judges and goes on the run, followed by Denzel's hungry
journalist. Then came the heart-rending Philadelphia. Here Tom
Hanks played a lawyer sacked for contracting AIDS, with Denzel as a
homophobic lawyer who has to stand for him in court.
Then came Crimson Tide, with Denzel back
in uniform as the First Officer on a nuclear sub who resorts to mutiny
to stop gung-ho captain Gene Hackman from zapping the Russkies and
starting World War 3. Denzel looks great in a uniform, especially a
white one, and he knows it. He also looks great in a tight white
teeshirt and will don one onscreen wherever possible (really, it's one
of the few things all his characters have in common).
After these came Virtuosity, with Denzel the only one capable of
catching a virtual criminal (Russell
Crowe), created from the personalities of 150 serial killers, who
somehow escapes into the real world. Then came the sorely under-rated
Devil In A Blue Dress where he played a private dick in post-WW2 LA,
hired to track down some blue blood's fiancee who's scarpered off into
the black area of town. As in Chinatown, nothing turns out to be as it
first seems. Next up was Courage Under Fire, once again with Edward
Zwick. Here it was back to the military with the D-Man as an officer,
haunted by mistakes in his own past, who goes to investigate the Gulf
War heroism, or otherwise, of the dead Meg Ryan.
Now came three wildly different pictures.
In The Preacher's Wife, Denzel played an angel who drops from Heaven to
help out a minister whose marriage to Whitney Houston is on the rocks
and whose church is being nicked by developer Gregory Hines. Then there
was the magnificent and bizarrely ignored Fallen - easily one of the
best supernatural thrillers of recent years. Here Denzel played a cop
who catches killer Elias Koteas (a brilliant loopy performance by him),
sees him executed and is then freaked out to discover he's back. How DID
he DO that? Well, it's excellent fun finding out.
And then there was a real step into the unknown with Spike Lee's He Got
Game. Everyone knows Denzel is good-looking. Indeed, when Newsweek ran a
feature trying to explain the biological basis for society's definition
of beauty, they used Denzel as a template. And it's very rare that
good-looking film stars deliberately play ugly. But that's what Denzel
did in He Got Game, playing the yellow-toothed, raggedy-headed,
wife-killing father of a basketball prodigy who sneakily tries to get
the boy to enrol at the Governor's own college in exchange for early
parole. Interestingly, when audiences saw Washington kiss the white Milla
Jovovich onscreen, many black women were appalled, claiming that he
was betraying them.
Now Denzel's movies were uniformly high-budget (they needed to be, from
Courage Under Fire on he was a $10 million a film man - and more). In
The Siege, once again with Zwick, he was an anti-terrorist expert who
battles with nutty general Bruce
Willis when New York is attacked and the city is brought under
martial law. Then there was The Bone Collector. This was not very scary
and featured one of the weakest tag-lines in living memory (Cue Denim ad
voice: "He collects human bones...he's the BONE Collector"),
but it gave Denzel another chance to stretch himself, as a bed-ridden
quadriplegic detective who uses Angelina
Jolie and a cool camera set-up to track down a serial murderer.
That was tough to play, but it had nothing on his next role, as boxer
Rubin Carter in The Hurricane. Carter, the subject of the famous Bob
Dylan song, was a real-life boxer who'd been on the verge of challenging
for the middleweight championship when he was framed for murder and
jailed for life (times three). He'd battled to prove his innocence but
discovered that racist elements in the authorities would prefer to keep
him inside, innocent or not. Then things changed...
Denzel trained for a year to get into
shape for the boxing sequences, at one point undergoing two hours boxing
practice a day for six months with trainer Terry Claybon. He lost 40
pounds, and he looked great. This was by no means the first time he'd
suffered for a part, he's actually renowned for his hardcore research.
For The Pelican Brief, he spent months with a Washington reporter. For
Glory he practised with Civil War re-enactors. For Philadelphia he
interviewed many lawyers, including the notorious Johnny Cochran. And
for Courage Under Fire he attended the National Training Centre at Fort
Irwin where he endured battle games, listened to crashing tapes of tank
battles from Desert Storm and also qualified to use a 120mm gun and
drive an M1A1 tank.
The Hurricane, directed by old pal Norman Jewison, should really have
won Denzel his second Oscar, but Kevin Spacey took it for American
Beauty. Washington would be back very soon for another try. First came
Remember The Titans, another true story about a black hero, this time
Herman Boone, a football coach who took over a college side in Virginia
in the early Seventies, immediately after racial integration was brought
in. And then came that second Oscar, for Training Day, where Ethan
Hawke played a rookie in Narcotics who spends his first day on the
job with Denzel's cynical Alonzo Harris, a cop who strays far from the
straight and narrow in his quest to bust dealers.
After this would come John Q, directed by Nick Cassavetes (whose dad,
John had appeared in Flesh And Blood, one of Denzel's earliest movies).
Here Denzel played a poverty-stricken father who can't afford his son's
heart transplant op and so holds up the local ER and demands they do
their thing there and then. And then came Denzel's directorial debut,
Antwone Fisher, where Denzel played a Navy psychologist who brings an
angry young man back from the edge of madness. It was a leap in the dark
for Denzel who'd previously only directed the video for Bebe Winans' In
Harm's Way.
2003 would bring the complex noir thriller Out Of Time, where Washington
played a Florida sheriff in the process of splitting from his detective
wife, Eva Mendes. Hooking up with an old flame, he finds she has cancer
(and a well-insured, wife-beating husband) and proceeds to steal
impounded drug money to fund her cure. Before the treatment can begin,
though, both flame and hubbie die in a house-fire and, with Mendes
investigating, all the evidence points to Denzel. He's not really
innocent, he's not really guilty - can he extricate himself from this
unholy mess?
Next came Man On Fire, directed by Tony Scott, where Denzel was hired to
protect an industrialist's family in Mexico City, only to see daughter
Dakota Fanning kidnapped. Tortured by his guilty military past and his
present alcoholism, he goes after the bad guys with all guns (and rocket
launchers and bombs) blazing. The movie did its best to turn his
character into a Terminator-type figure, even having him deliver a smart
one-liner as he shoves explosives up a man's rectum, but Washington was
too smart to let it descend into abject silliness, clearly revealing the
man's warped religion and pained search for redemption.
The same year, 2004, brought another
winner in The Manchurian Candidate, a remake of the Frank Sinatra
paranoia-fest. Here Liev Schreiber, driven on by ruthless senator mum
Meryl Streep, is pushing for high office, his credentials boosted by an
act of heroism during the Gulf War. Washington would play one of the old
army colleagues he supposedly saved, a man troubled by flashes of
nightmare that contradict the official party line. He must dig deep into
traumatic memories to find the truth then, under threat from shady and
all-powerful corporate interests, reveal it to the people.
Denzel's planned next move, sadly, did not come to fruition. Signed up
to reteam with his Training Day director, Antoine Fuqua, for American
Gangster (AKA Tru Blu), he was all set to play notorious Seventies drug
lord Frank Lucas, with Benicio Del Toro also onboard. The screenplay, by
Steve "Schindler's List" Zaillian, was hot. But then disputes,
rumoured to be over Universal's desire to cast Matt
Damon, caused the project to collapse. Clauses in his contract meant
that Denzel was still paid - apparently $20 million - but it was still a
terrible shame. There were high hopes, though, of a Sammy Davis biopic,
Denzel having snapped up the rights to the biography Sammy In Black And
White.
Nowadays, Denzel spends as much time as he can with his family in an LA
mansion once owned by William Holden - when he's not filming or working
at his production company. This, called Mundy Lane Entertainment after
the place Denzel grew up, debuted with Devil In A Blue Dress and has
made well-received documentaries on Hank Aaron and Shaft-director Gordon
Parks, both Emmy-nominated. Home-life, of course, is important as the
kids are growing up now. They have an added value, too, because he
foolishly once risked losing them. Before the Oscars of 1993, in an
interview with Barbara Walters, conversation turned to sexual
temptation. Very unwisely, Denzel said "Being a star and all of
that, temptation is all around. It's all around, you know, and I haven't
been perfect. I'll be quite candid about that". The press, of
course, went mental. Washington would never be that candid again.
It's a shame, because forthrightness suited him. Everyone loves the
story of when Quentin Tarantino was brought in to "liven up"
the script of Crimson Tide. On-set, Denzel lambasted him big-time for
his use of racial slurs in his movies. Tarantino suggested maybe they
should talk somewhere more private, but Denzel said no - right here
would do. But, as he said himself, there's more to him than his
blackness - there's his integrity and generosity, and the fact that he's
one of the finest actors of his generation. Before the Oscars of 2002, Julia
Roberts stood firmly in his corner, saying "I cannot absorb
living in a world where I have an Oscar for Best Actress and Denzel
doesn't have one for Best Actor". She had a point, and was clearly
overjoyed when presenting him with the honour herself. He so obviously
deserved it. ~ Dominic Wills |
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