Denzel Washington
(Gray Grantham)

Denzel Washington was born in 1954 in Mount Vernon, N.Y. He was the middle of three children born to a Pentecostal minister father and a beautician mother. After graduating from high school, he enrolled at Fordham University, intent on pursuing a career in journalism. However, he caught the acting bug while appearing in student productions and upon graduation moved to San Francisco, where he enrolled at the American Conservatory Theater. He left after one year to seek work as an actor and had no difficulty finding parts in numerous television productions. He made his first big-screen appearance in Carbon Copy (1981), opposite George Segal.

Through the '80s he worked in both movies and television and was chosen for the role of Dr. Chandler in NBC's hit medical series St. Elsewhere (1982), a role that he would play for six years. His career was further spurred by his riveting performance as the outspoken recruit in A Soldier's Story (1984). He garnered additional kudos playing the supporting role of South African activist Steven Biko in Cry Freedom (1987), resulting in his first Academy Award® nomination. Washington moved to leading man status the following year playing a Falklands War hero down on his luck in Thatcherite London in the British feature For Queen and Country(1988). He consolidated his future in films by winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar® for his portrayal of a proudly defiant and overcompensating former slave turned soldier in Ed Zwick's Glory (1989).

After faring well on center stage as the womanizing trumpeter Bleek Gilliam in Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues (1990), he began to emerge as one of Hollywood's elite society of bankable black film stars. Spellbinding as Malcolm X (1992), the focus of Lee's epic biopic, Washington earned a Best Actor Oscar® nomination for his efforts. He went on to prove himself capable with Shakespearean dialogue in the role of Don Pedro in Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing (1993).

The Pelican Brief (1993) marked something of a career turning point for Washington. Cast alongside Julia Roberts in an adaptation of the best-selling John Grisham legal thriller, he demonstrated that he could help sell a mainstream Hollywood blockbuster. Philadelphia (1993), which followed, was a prestige project that had the additional good fortune to become a box-office smash, further increasing his exposure. In it, Washington capably played a homophobic attorney who takes the case of an HIV-positive lawyer unfairly fired by his law firm. Some reviewers deemed the role more challenging than the sympathetic central character winningly played by Tom Hanks. Washington was well paired with film veteran Gene Hackman in Crimson Tide (1995), a nuclear brinkmanship thriller set on a submarine. Washington went on to earn strong critical praise for his turn as an armored tank commander during the Persian Gulf War who is assigned to investigate a female candidate (Meg Ryan) for the Medal of Honor in Edward Zwick's Courage Under Fire (1996). That same year, the actor co-starred with singer-turned-actress Whitney Houston in Penny Marshall's The Preacher's Wife, a remake of 1947's The Bishop's Wife. In 1998 he re-teamed with director Spike Lee for the basketball-themed He Got Game.

To close out the millennium, Washington starred in The Hurricane, losing 40 pounds to play the unjustly imprisoned former middleweight boxing contender Ruben 'Hurricane' Carter. Despite engendering some controversy over the way that some facts from the case were omitted or rearranged, the film earned raves for Washington, who picked up his second Best Actor Academy Award® nomination for his heartfelt portrayal of Carter. Boaz Yakin's Remember the Titans (2000) followed, casting him as a high school football coach who, in assuming the reins of an integrated team, must employ his former white rival as an assistant to vie for a state championship.

Washington moved into producing with Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), the first feature from his Mundy Lane production company, and executive produced the TV documentary Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream (TBS, 1995). He broke into directing with the Winans' "In Harm's Way" video and Finding Fish, the upcoming story of a former Sony Pictures security guard-turned-screenwriter. Most recently, he starred as a corrupt cop in Training Day (2001), which brought him a Best Actor nod from the Los Angeles Film Critics Society, and completed work on the upcoming John Q (2002).