Denzel Washington

Denzel Hayes Washington Jr. (born December 28, 1954) is an American actor, producer, and director. Known for his dramatic roles on stage and screen, The New York Times named him the greatest actor of the 21st century in 2020. He has received several accolades, including two Academy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, and a Tony Award as well as nominations for two Emmy Awards and a Grammy Award. He has been honored with the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2016, AFI Life Achievement Award in 2019, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2025.

After training at the American Conservatory Theater, Washington began his career in theater, acting in performances off-Broadway. He first came to prominence in the NBC medical drama series St. Elsewhere (1982–1988), and in the war film A Soldier's Story (1984). He won Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor for playing an American Civil War soldier in the war drama Glory (1989) and for Best Actor for playing a corrupt police officer in the crime thriller Training Day (2001). He was Oscar-nominated for his roles in Cry Freedom (1987), Malcolm X (1992), The Hurricane (1999), Flight (2012), Fences (2016), Roman J. Israel, Esq. (2017), and The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021).

Washington has starred in several commercially successful films, including The Pelican Brief, Philadelphia (both 1993), Crimson Tide (1995), Remember the Titans (2000), Man on Fire (2004), Déjà Vu, Inside Man (both 2006), American Gangster (2007), Unstoppable, The Book of Eli (both 2010), Safe House (2012), 2 Guns (2013), The Equalizer trilogy (2014–2023), and Gladiator II (2024). Washington has also directed the films Antwone Fisher (2002), The Great Debaters (2007), Fences (2016), and A Journal for Jordan (2021).

On stage, he has acted in The Public Theater productions of Coriolanus (1979) and The Tragedy of Richard III (1990). He made his Broadway debut in the Ron Milner play Checkmates (1988). He won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his role as a disillusioned working class father in the Broadway revival of August Wilson's play Fences (2010). He has also acted in the Broadway revivals of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (2005) and Othello (2025), Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun (2014), and Eugene O'Neill's play The Iceman Cometh (2018).

Denzel Hayes Washington Jr. was born in Mount Vernon, New York, on December 28, 1954. His mother, Lennis "Lynne" (Lowe), was a beauty parlor owner and operator born in Georgia and partly raised in Harlem, New York. His father, Denzel Hayes Washington Sr., a native of Buckingham County, Virginia, was an ordained Pentecostal minister who was also an employee of the New York City Water Department, and worked at a local S. Klein department store.

Washington attended Pennington-Grimes Elementary School in Mount Vernon until 1968. When he was 14, his parents divorced and his mother sent him to the private preparatory school Oakland Military Academy in New Windsor, New York. Washington later said, "That decision changed my life, because I wouldn't have survived in the direction I was going. The guys I was hanging out with at the time, my running buddies, have now done maybe 40 years combined in the penitentiary. They were nice guys, but the streets got them." After Oakland, he attended Mainland High School in Daytona Beach, Florida, from 1970 to 1971.

He was interested in attending Texas Tech University: "I grew up in the Boys Club in Mount Vernon, and we were the Red Raiders. So when I was in high school, I wanted to go to Texas Tech in Lubbock just because they were called the Red Raiders and their uniforms looked like ours." Instead, he earned a BA in Drama and Journalism from Fordham University in 1977. At Fordham, he played collegiate basketball as a guard under coach P. J. Carlesimo. After a period of indecision on which major to study and taking a semester off, Washington worked as creative arts director of the overnight summer camp at Camp Sloane YMCA in Lakeville, Connecticut. He participated in a staff talent show for the campers and a colleague suggested he try acting.

Returning to Fordham that fall with a renewed purpose, Washington enrolled at the Lincoln Center campus to study acting, where he was cast in the title roles in Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones and Shakespeare's Othello. He then attended graduate school at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, California, where he stayed for one year before returning to New York to begin a professional acting career.

Washington spent the summer of 1976 in St. Mary's City, Maryland, in summer stock theater performing Wings of the Morning, the Maryland State play, which was written for him by incorporating an African-American character/narrator based loosely on the historical figure from early colonial Maryland, Mathias de Sousa.

Shortly after graduating from Fordham, Washington made his screen acting debut in the 1977 made-for-television film Wilma which was a docudrama about sprinter Wilma Rudolph, and made his first Hollywood appearance in the 1981 film Carbon Copy. He shared a 1982 Distinguished Ensemble Performance Obie Award for playing Private First Class Melvin Peterson in the Off-Broadway Negro Ensemble Company production A Soldier's Play which premiered November 20, 1981.

A major career break came when he starred as Dr. Phillip Chandler in NBC's television hospital drama St. Elsewhere, which ran from 1982 to 1988. He was one of only a few African-American actors to appear on the series for its entire six-year run. He also appeared in several television, motion picture and stage roles, such as the films A Soldier's Story (1984), Hard Lessons (1986) and Power (1986). In 1987, he starred as South African anti-apartheid political activist Stephen Biko in Richard Attenborough's Cry Freedom, for which he received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

In 1989, Washington won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of a defiant, self-possessed ex-slave soldier in the film Glory. That same year, he appeared in the film The Mighty Quinn; and in For Queen and Country, where he played the conflicted and disillusioned Reuben James, a British soldier who, despite a distinguished military career, returns to a civilian life where racism and inner-city life lead to vigilantism and violence.

In the summer of 1990, Washington had appeared in the title role of the Public Theater's production of William Shakespeare's Richard III. Mel Gussow of The New York Times praised Washington as "an actor of range and intensity, is expert at projecting a feeling of controlled rage". Also that year Washington starred as Bleek Gilliam in the Spike Lee film Mo' Better Blues. Charles Murray of Empire praised Washington's performance as a "taut portrayal of the driven musician" and "like all Lee’s film, Mo’ Better Blues is a real ensemble piece, and the standard of the performances is uniformly excellent: but Washington [and] Lee deserve extra plaudits." In 1991, he starred as Demetrius Williams in the Mira Nair directed romantic drama Mississippi Masala opposite Sarita Choudhury. Set primarily in rural Mississippi, the film explores interracial romance between African Americans and Indian Americans. Critic Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times praised the chemistry of the two leads writing, "Washington is an actor of immense and natural charm, and he makes a good match with Sarita Choudhury".

Washington was reunited with Lee to play one of his most critically acclaimed roles, the title character of the historical epic Malcolm X (1992). The New York Times gave the film it's Critic's Pick with Vincent Canby declaring, "In Denzel Washington it also has a fine actor who does for "Malcolm X" what Ben Kingsley did for "Gandhi". Mr. Washington not only looks the part, but he also has the psychological heft, the intelligence and the reserve to give the film the dramatic excitement". His performance as the Black nationalist leader earned him another nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. Also that year, he established the production company Mundy Lane Entertainment. The next year, he played the lawyer defending a gay man with AIDS played by Tom Hanks in the Jonathan Demme film Philadelphia (1993). Sight & Sound wrote, "Casting Washington in the lead guaranteed the film the black audience that otherwise might not have had much interest in the problems of a rich white homosexual with Aids. But Aids is rampant in inner cities, where it attacks not just gay men, but IV drug users and women."

During the early and mid-1990s, Washington starred in several successful thrillers, including The Pelican Brief with Julia Roberts in 1993, and Crimson Tide with Gene Hackman in 1995, as well as the Shakespearean comedy Much Ado About Nothing directed by Kenneth Branagh. In 1996, he played a U.S. Army officer who investigates a female chopper commander's worthiness for the Medal of Honor in Courage Under Fire, opposite Meg Ryan. Variety wrote, "All of [the] predicaments are palpably and convincingly registered through Washington’s probing, reserved and sensitively drawn performance in a role that, in another era, might have been played by the likes of a Montgomery Clift or William Holden."

In 1996, he starred alongside Whitney Houston, and Courtney B. Vance in the romantic comedy The Preacher's Wife directed by Penny Marshall. The film is a remake of the 1947 film The Bishop's Wife starring Cary Grant, Loretta Young, and David Niven. In 1998, Washington starred in Spike Lee's film He Got Game. Washington played a father serving a six-year prison term when the prison warden offers him a temporary parole to convince his top-ranked high-school basketball player son (Ray Allen) to sign with the governor's alma mater, Big State. The film was Washington's third collaboration with Lee. The same year he starred in Gregory Hoblit's supernatural horror film Fallen (1998) with John Goodman, James Gandolfini, and Donald Sutherland.