Denzel Washington

Before the Oscars, the Broadway prizes, and the box-office reach, Denzel Hayes Washington Jr. was a kid from Mount Vernon, New York, born on December 28, 1954, in a suburb just north of New York City. His mother, Lennis “Lynne” Lowe, owned and operated a beauty parlor; his father, Denzel Hayes Washington Sr., was an ordained Pentecostal minister who also worked for the New York City Water Department and at a local S. Klein department store. Washington grew up close enough to Harlem, church life, city work, and neighborhood pressure to understand discipline from more than one angle.

When he was 14, his parents divorced, and his mother sent him to Oakland Military Academy in New Windsor, New York. Washington later said that choice changed his life, because the friends he had been running with were pulled into the streets and prison. After Oakland, he attended Mainland High School in Daytona Beach, Florida, then went on to Fordham University, where he played basketball and earned a BA in Drama and Journalism in 1977. Acting did not arrive as a neat childhood plan. After a period of uncertainty and a semester off, he worked as creative arts director at Camp Sloane YMCA in Connecticut, joined a staff talent show, and was encouraged by a colleague to try acting.

Back at Fordham, Washington studied acting at the Lincoln Center campus and was cast in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones and Shakespeare’s Othello. He trained at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco for a year, then returned to New York to begin professional work. His early career moved through theater, television, and film: summer stock in Maryland, a screen debut in the television film Wilma, a first Hollywood appearance in Carbon Copy, and an Obie Award shared with the ensemble of the Off-Broadway production A Soldier’s Play.

Washington first became widely known as Dr. Phillip Chandler on NBC’s medical drama St. Elsewhere, which ran from 1982 to 1988. He was one of the few African-American actors to appear on the series for its full six-year run. Film roles soon deepened his reputation. He earned his first Academy Award nomination for playing South African anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko in Cry Freedom, then won Best Supporting Actor for his role as a defiant Civil War soldier in Glory. Later, he won Best Actor for playing a corrupt police officer in Training Day, and received further Oscar nominations for Malcolm X, The Hurricane, Flight, Fences, Roman J. Israel, Esq., and The Tragedy of Macbeth.

His range has stretched across courtroom dramas, historical portraits, thrillers, Shakespeare, August Wilson, and action films, including Philadelphia, Crimson Tide, Remember the Titans, Man on Fire, Inside Man, American Gangster, The Book of Eli, and The Equalizer trilogy. He has also directed Antwone Fisher, The Great Debaters, Fences, and A Journal for Jordan. On stage, he won a Tony Award for Fences and returned to Broadway in works by Shakespeare, Lorraine Hansberry, and Eugene O’Neill. His words still resonate because they sound like lessons earned through pressure, patience, and self-command: “Never give up on something you really want. It’s difficult to wait, but it’s more difficult to regret.”