Denzel Washington

Info

Full Name: Denzel Washington
Date of birth: December 28, 1954 (71 years old)
Location: Mount Vernon, New York
Country: USA

Denzel Washington has been active for 38 years, participating in 37 movies that average a 7.1/10 score.

Videos eCartelera

Tráiler en VOSE de 'Harry Potter' T1

Biography

At twenty, Denzel Washington had no idea what to do with himself. He was spending the summer as a counsellor at a YMCA camp in Connecticut when the staff put on a show for the kids, and a colleague who watched him told him he should try acting. Half a century later, that directionless student has two Oscars, a Tony, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and an honorary Palme d'Or.

Mount Vernon, military academy and Fordham

He was born on 28 December 1954 in Mount Vernon, just north of New York City. His father, Denzel Hayes Washington Sr., was a Pentecostal minister who also worked for the city water department; his mother, Lennis, ran a beauty parlour. His parents' divorce, when he was fourteen, left him adrift, and his mother made the decision he still calls the most important of his life: sending him to Oakland Military Academy in New Windsor.

"That decision changed my life, because I wouldn't have survived in the direction I was going," he has said more than once. At Fordham University he played basketball under P.J. Carlesimo and drifted between biology and journalism. Back from that camp job, he auditioned for Eugene O'Neill's 'The Emperor Jones' and beat the drama students to the part. He graduated in 1977 with a degree in drama and journalism, then spent a year at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.

Television and theatre came first. He made his screen debut in the TV film 'Wilma' (1977), where he met the pianist and actress Pauletta Pearson, and in 1982 he shared an Obie Award for the off Broadway play 'A Soldier's Play'. That same year he joined NBC's hospital drama 'St. Elsewhere' as Dr Philip Chandler, a part he kept for six seasons. When Norman Jewison filmed the play as 'A Soldier's Story' (1984), Washington reprised the role.

From Steve Biko to Malcolm X

His first Oscar nomination came for playing South African activist Steve Biko in 'Cry Freedom' (1987), directed by Richard Attenborough. Two years later he won Best Supporting Actor for 'Glory' (1989), Edward Zwick's drama about one of the first Black regiments in the Union Army. He was 35 and still not a household name.

The partnership that shaped the decade was with Spike Lee. First came the egotistical trumpeter of 'Mo' Better Blues' (1990), then the role of his life: 'Malcolm X' (1992), a biography running well past three hours that brought him his first Best Actor nomination. They'd work together again on 'He Got Game' (1998), 'Inside Man' (2006) and 'Highest 2 Lowest' (2025).

Around all that he took wildly different jobs: the lawyer who defends Tom Hanks in 'Philadelphia' (1993), directed by Jonathan Demme; the Don Pedro of Kenneth Branagh's 'Much Ado About Nothing' (1993); the reporter digging alongside Julia Roberts in 'The Pelican Brief' (1993); and the officer squaring up to Gene Hackman aboard a nuclear submarine in 'Crimson Tide' (1995). That same year he played private eye Easy Rawlins in Carl Franklin's neo noir 'Devil in a Blue Dress'.

The decade closed with 'Courage Under Fire' (1996), 'The Preacher's Wife' (1996) opposite Whitney Houston, 'The Bone Collector' (1999) with Angelina Jolie and 'The Hurricane' (1999), in which he played boxer Rubin Carter, jailed for a triple murder he didn't commit. It won him a Silver Bear in Berlin and a Golden Globe.

'Training Day' and a move behind the camera

In 2001 he did the one thing nobody expected: he played a villain. Alonzo Harris, the bent LAPD detective who drags rookie Ethan Hawke around Los Angeles in 'Training Day', won him the Academy Award for Best Actor. The 2002 ceremony made history: Halle Berry won Best Actress the same night and Sidney Poitier collected an honorary Oscar. Washington was only the second Black man to take the lead acting prize, nearly forty years after Poitier himself.

He'd had a huge commercial hit the year before with 'Remember the Titans' (2000), about an American football coach at a newly integrated high school, and in 2002 he directed for the first time with 'Antwone Fisher'. Three more followed: 'The Great Debaters' (2007), 'Fences' (2016) and 'A Journal for Jordan' (2021).

His other regular collaborator was Tony Scott. After 'Crimson Tide' came 'Man on Fire' (2004), with a very young Dakota Fanning; 'Deja Vu' (2006); 'The Taking of Pelham 123' (2009); and 'Unstoppable' (2010), the last film the British director completed. For Ridley Scott he played the real Harlem heroin baron Frank Lucas opposite Russell Crowe in 'American Gangster' (2007).

Broadway, August Wilson and an unlikely franchise

Washington has always described himself as a stage actor rather than a film star. He went back to Broadway as Brutus in 'Julius Caesar' in 2005, and in 2010 he won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for 'Fences', August Wilson's drama about Troy Maxson, a bitter Pittsburgh bin man who once played in the Negro Leagues. Viola Davis played his wife.

Six years later he brought the production to the screen as director and star. 'Fences' (2016) earned him another nomination, competed for Best Picture and won Davis her first Oscar. He has kept championing Wilson's plays since: he produced 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom' (2020), Chadwick Boseman's final film, and 'The Piano Lesson' (2024), directed by his son Malcolm and starring his son John David Washington.

Prestige and box office ran in parallel. 'Flight' (2012), as an alcoholic pilot who saves a plane with an impossible manoeuvre, brought another Oscar nomination. Then in 2014 Antoine Fuqua handed him the most lucrative franchise of his career with 'The Equalizer', followed by 'The Equalizer 2' (2018) and 'The Equalizer 3' (2023). The pair also made the western 'The Magnificent Seven' (2016).

The 2020s have pushed him somewhere harsher. 'The Tragedy of Macbeth' (2021), the first feature Joel Coen directed without his brother, put him opposite Frances McDormand in stark black and white and brought his ninth acting nomination, more than any other Black performer in the history of the award.

In 2024 plenty of critics decided he was the best thing in 'Gladiator II'. His Macrinus, an arms dealer pulling Rome's strings around Paul Mescal and Pedro Pascal, got him a Golden Globe nomination, though the Academy left him out. "I've been around too long," he shrugged when someone raised the snub.

2025 was his busiest year in ages. From February to June he played 'Othello' on Broadway, with Jake Gyllenhaal as Iago and Kenny Leon directing, the first Broadway revival of the play in more than forty years. In May he went to Cannes for the first time in fifty years of work, and the festival surprised him with an honorary Palme d'Or minutes before the premiere of 'Highest 2 Lowest', the Spike Lee reunion that updates Akira Kurosawa's 'High and Low'.

Faith, family and a retirement he keeps announcing

He married Pauletta Pearson on 25 June 1983, six years after meeting her on 'Wilma'. They're still together and have four children: John David, Katia and the twins Malcolm and Olivia, born in 1991. In 1995 they renewed their vows in South Africa in a ceremony led by Desmond Tutu.

The son of a preacher, faith has run through his whole life. In December 2024, a week before his seventieth birthday, he was baptised and given a minister's licence at Kelly Temple Church of God in Christ in Harlem. He has been just as open about drink: at his worst he was getting through two bottles of wine a day, a pattern that lasted roughly fifteen years, and he stopped completely around his sixtieth birthday in 2014.

In January 2025 Joe Biden awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the United States. What's left, by his own account, is a short list: the heist thriller 'Here Comes the Flood' for Fernando Meirelles with Robert Pattinson, his Marvel debut for Ryan Coogler in the third 'Black Panther', and a 'King Lear' he has been promising for years. Then he retires. Given how rarely he repeats himself, it's probably worth waiting to see.