Samuel L. Jackson
Samuel L. Jackson is a prominent American actor known for his dynamic performances in a wide range of films across genres, particularly in action and crime. Born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Jackson's early life was shaped by the racial dynamics of the 1950s South. Initially studying marine biology at Morehouse College, he discovered his passion for acting after becoming involved in theater during college. Jackson’s career took off in the late 1980s, particularly after his breakthrough role in Spike Lee's "Jungle Fever," which allowed him to confront his own struggles with substance abuse.
Jackson gained significant fame through his role as Jules Winnfield in Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction," a performance that earned him an Academy Award nomination. He has become one of the highest-grossing actors in film history, with his movies collectively earning over $27 billion. Jackson is also well-known for his work in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Nick Fury, further solidifying his place in modern pop culture. Throughout his career, he has been recognized not only for his box office success but also for his ability to portray complex characters with both humor and depth, earning him an honorary Oscar for his lifetime achievements in 2022.
Samuel L. Jackson
- Born: December 21, 1948
- Birthplace: Washington, D.C.
Actor
Jackson became a major star in the 1990s in such films as Pulp Fiction (1994). After starting his acting career in theater, he has had dozens of film roles. Whether playing police officers, criminals, lawyers, or ordinary citizens, Jackson is one of the most distinctive and commanding film presences of his generation.
Area of achievement: Film: acting
Early Life
Born in Washington, DC, Samuel Leroy Jackson was an only child, and his parents separated when he was very young. Unable to collect child support, Jackson’s mother sent him to live with his grandparents in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she later joined him. Growing up in the South in the 1950s, young Jackson learned about the restrictions placed upon African Americans by White people. When he saw Band of Angels (1957) in a Black theater, a scene in which Sidney Poitier slaps Yvonne De Carlo was cut out so that it would not encourage Black people to stand up to White people.
Jackson attended films regularly and reenacted them afterward. He also performed small roles in his aunt’s theater productions. He had no show business ambitions, however, when he enrolled at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, intending to study marine biology. In 1969, the Negro Ensemble Company staged two plays on campus, and Jackson’s interest in acting was renewed. After being expelled for participating in a student protest, he was a social worker in Los Angeles for two years before returning to Morehouse to study drama.
Upon his graduation in 1972, Jackson joined Atlanta’s Black Image Theater Company, where he met his wife, LaTanya Richardson. In 1976, the couple moved to New York City, where Jackson performed in Off-Broadway plays such as Ntozake Shange’s 1980 adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. During these years, Jackson supplemented his acting income by working as a doorman and security guard. He was also Bill Cosby’s stand-in on The Cosby Show for two years. While performing in the Negro Ensemble Company’s production of Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play (1981), Jackson met Morgan Freeman, who persuaded him he could succeed as an actor. Jackson’s other notable theater work included the original production of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson (1987) at the Yale Repertory Theater. When the play moved to Broadway, Jackson served as understudy to Charles S. Dutton in the role he originated. Jackson returned to the Yale Repertory Theater for Wilson’s Two Trains Running (1989).
Life’s Work
Early in his career, Jackson had small roles in such films as Together for Days (1972) and Ragtime (1981). After Spike Lee saw A Soldier’s Play, he promised to cast Jackson in the films he hoped to direct. Lee fulfilled this promise by giving Jackson parts in School Daze (1988), Do the Right Thing (1989), Mo’ Better Blues (1990), and Jungle Fever (1991). Playing a drug addict in Jungle Fever proved a breakthrough role in many ways: In addition to giving Jackson his showiest role, it helped him face up to his own problems with drugs, alcohol, and womanizing. Jackson became determined not to end up like his character. The performance, the first Jackson said he did not long to go back and fix, earned him Best Supporting Actor honors from the Cannes Film Festival and the New York Film Critics Circle.
With Jungle Fever firmly establishing his credentials, Jackson began working more regularly in films, including big-budget productions such as Patriot Games (1992) and Jurassic Park (1993), though mostly in small roles. He finally moved on to leading roles after Quentin Tarantino cast him as a philosophical hitman in Pulp Fiction (1994). The role, which earned Jackson an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor, established a type that the actor played in numerous films: the wisecracking, dangerous, but sensitive man with a penetrating gaze.
Jackson went on to play leading or costarring roles in several action and crime films during the 1990s. In Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), Jackson played an ordinary citizen who joins policeman Bruce Willis to try to stop terrorist bombers. He was a detective helping amnesiac Geena Davis recover her memory in The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) and a hostage negotiator in The Negotiator (1998). He joined the Star Wars franchise for Star Wars: Episode 1—The Phantom Menace (1999) and its two sequels. Working again with Tarantino, Jackson played a vicious arms dealer in Jackie Brown (1997) and, for this part, was named best actor at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Jackson got to show some range during the 1990s with roles not involving guns and explosions. In Losing Isaiah (1995), he played an attorney for an African American woman (Halle Berry) trying to regain custody of her son from his White adoptive parents. In the highly regarded Eve’s Bayou (1997), set in 1962 Louisiana, Jackson was a married doctor with a roving eye. He played a scientist in Sphere (1998) and a violin expert in Le Violon rouge (1998; The Red Violin).
In the years that followed, Jackson continued alternating between action and nonaction roles. He was a no-nonsense private detective in Shaft (2000), a remake of the groundbreaking 1971 film; a comic-book expert with a deadly secret in Unbreakable (2000), reteaming with Willis; a policeman in S.W.A.T. (2003); a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent in Snakes on a Plane (2006); the manager of a supernatural hotel in 1408 (2007); and a master criminal in Jumper (2008) and The Spirit (2008). Jackson took breaks from high-concept films to play a victimized recovering alcoholic in Changing Lanes (2002), an inspirational high school basketball coach in Coach Carter (2005), a soldier fighting in Iraq in Home of the Brave (2006), a homeless former boxer in Resurrecting the Champ (2007), and a washed-up singer in Soul Men (2008). Jackson’s distinctive voice also made him an in-demand actor for animated films, such as The Incredibles (2004), and as a narrator, as in Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards (2009). A star who clearly enjoys being an actor, he has proudly admitted to seeing all his films in theaters with paying audiences and stopping whenever he sees himself on television.
The beginning of the 2010s saw Jackson expand his reach in the entertainment industry yet further, as he continued serving as a commercial spokesperson for Capital One and began making regular appearances in the increasingly popular Marvel Cinematic Universe as the character Nick Fury, who works for many years for the intelligence and security agency S.H.I.E.L.D. After first making an uncredited appearance as Fury in the end-credit scenes of Iron Man (2008), he would go on to portray the character to varying degrees in the hit MCU films Iron Man 2 (2010), Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), The Avengers (2012), Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Captain Marvel (2019), Avengers: Endgame (2019), and Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019), as well as the television series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013–20).
Meanwhile, he remained an in-demand and busy actor for a wide range of genres, landing roles in additional big-screen features such as the action-comedy The Other Guys (2010), Tarantino's dramatic Western Django Unchained (2012), the sci-fi action film RoboCop (2014), the action-adventure Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014), the Tarantino crime-drama The Hateful Eight (2015), and the action-adventure Kong: Skull Island (2017). As well as starring alongside Ryan Reynolds in 2017's The Hitman's Bodyguard, he once again provided the voice for the character Lucius Best in the sequel Incredibles 2 (2018) before reprising his role as Elijah Price for the Unbreakable sequel Glass (2019). Also in 2019, he returned to the Shaft series with his lead role in that year's Shaft.
Continuing to act in the 2020s, Jackson appeared alongside Anthony Mackie as a star of the 2020 drama The Banker. That same year, he presented and served as executive producer for the docuseries Enslaved. In 2021, Jackson continued his prolific career, appearing in Spiral, Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard, and The Protégé. In 2022, Jackson starred in The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey and lent his voice to the animated film Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank as well as Nick Fury in the Marvel Snap video game.
Significance
Along with other acclaimed Black actors of his era, including Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, and Don Cheadle, Jackson flourished in American films of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. While he specialized more in action and crime films than his colleagues, he nevertheless showed considerable range, playing heroes and villains with equal gusto, often adding a subversively humorous touch. His combination of wit and sensitivity as Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction made the character one of the most indelible of the 1990s. While Jackson was not the first African American action star, he has had the longest, most diverse, and most successful career in such films. By 2006, Jackson’s films had accumulated more money at the box office, $6 billion, than those of any other actor in history at that time. By 2022, his films had accumulated a total of more than $27 billion. That year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Jackson an honorary Oscar for his lifetime achievements; while he had been nominated for an Academy Award before, this marked the first Oscar of Jackson's career.
Bibliography
Ables, Kelsey. "Samuel L. Jackson Accepts Honorary Oscar in Emotional Ceremony.'" The Washington Post, 26 Mar. 2022, www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/03/26/samuel-l-jackson-oscar/. Accessed 7 Apr. 2022.
Collier, Aldore. “Samuel Jackson Talks About His Marriage, the Oscar Snubs, and Why He Works So Hard.” Ebony 58, no. 10, August, 2003, pp. 170-173, 175.
Davies, Hannah J. "Samuel L Jackson: 'A Fullness Comes upon Me Every Time I Land in Africa.'" The Guardian, 20 Oct. 2020, www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/oct/20/samuel-l-jackson-interview-enslavement-africa-roots-race-latanya-richardson. Accessed 9 Apr. 2021.
Hudson, Jeff. Samuel L. Jackson: The Unauthorized Biography. London: Virgin Books, 2004.
Tyrangiel, Josh. “His Own Best Fan.” Time, August 14, 2006, 64-65.
“Samuel L. Jackson.” IMDb, 2023, www.imdb.com/name/nm0000168/. Accessed 23 Apr. 2023.