Denzel Washington

‘Déjà vu’ “describes the experience of feeling that you have previously witnessed a new situation. The ‘déjà vu’ is accompanied by a feeling of familiarity, but also by one of strangeness or strangeness”. It could have been déjà vu for Denzel Washington to pick up his second Oscar for Training Day . No colored man has two statuettes, except Sidney Potier, and one of them honorary. These awards, added to two Silver Bears in Berlin and two Golden Globes, and a long career with more than forty titles, attest to Washington’s quality as an actor. His work has trumped two of his birth tags, his race and his attractiveness.

Denzel Washington was born on December 28, 1954 in Mount Vernon, New York. He was the middle of three children of a marriage formed by a preacher and a beautician and gospel singer. From them he inherited his spiritual restlessness, as he considers himself a religious man. His parents divorced when he was 14, at which time he was sent to boarding school. After graduating he enrolled in medicine, but the future doctor regretted his choice and switched to political science, while he thought that perhaps his future would lie in law or journalism. That was when he realized that he wanted to act, a way to approach all those professions that he had discarded. This decision led him to San Francisco, where he enrolled at the American Conservatory Theater. Studies were not his thing. so he left the center a year later to find a job as an actor. His first opportunity came in 1977 with the telefilmwilma . He coincided as a secondary with Pauletta Washington, whom he married in 1983. Together they have formed a large family of four children, to which Washington is completely devoted.

The first years of television gave way to cinema, a medium to which he has dedicated his career. His premiere was in the comedy Call me Mr. Charly (1981), where he worked as a secondary. Curiously, this genre was to be a minority in his filmography, since it would only be repeated in titles such as Black Ghost (1990), Much Ado About Nothing (1993) or The Preacher’s Wife(nineteen ninety six). And it is that his career is characterized by drama and thriller with action elements. In some of those dramas, Washington dealt with racism, a subject with which he is very committed. However, he cannot be considered the typical representative of ‘black power’ either, since he claims to be proud of being black, “although color is not all that I am”. Still, he denounced racism in dramas like A Soldier’s Story (1984 ), Mississippi Masala (1991) and Edward Zwick ‘s Glory Times (1989), which won him an Oscar for best supporting actor.

Within the drama, Washington has come to specialize in embodying real characters, many of whom have a very close relationship with the defense of black rights. This was the case in Cry for Freedom (1987), Hurricane Carter (1999) and Malcolm X (1992), by Spike Lee , one of his most remembered titles where he played the mythical activist. The biographical drama had opened the door to prominence for him thanks to Hard Lessons (1986), and his interest in this genre continued in The More, the Better (1990), by Spike Lee, and Titans. They made history (2000). He seemed to like him enough to cast him in his directorial debut inAntwone Fisher (2002), about a sailor with a traumatic past.

The other constant in Denzel’s career is his action-tinged thrillers. In them it is common to find him in the role of a soldier, as in Red Tide (1995), by Tony Scott , or The Messenger of Fear (2004), by Jonathan Demme ; although in the majority he works as a law enforcement officer in its different modalities: Ricochet (1991), The Devil Dressed in Blue (1995), Fallen (1998), State of Siege (1998), The Bone Collector (1999), or Hidden Plan (2006), by Spike Lee, who was said to be his fetish actor after working together four times. The brother ofRidley Scott must also have been satisfied with his work, since he has just worked with him for the third time in Déjà vu (2006), a thriller in which he has once again been a policeman. These titles of no-nonsense and helpful law enforcement officers created an ideal image of Washington that some quarters came to criticize. Comments that fell into oblivion after Denzel played the corrupt and cynical police officer in Training Day (2001), the key to his second statuette. Those gossips never had much reason to exist before an actor who has worked with Sidney Lumet in Power (1986), with Alan J. Pakula in The Pelican Brief (1993), with Jonathan Demme in Philadelphia(1993), with Nick Cassavetes in John Q (2002), and who has just shot under the orders of Ridley Scott American Gangster . In this film, he has shared the bill with Russell Crowe and Cuba Gooding Jr. , moving away from his usual ‘goodness’ to play a drug dealer. Washington is currently working on his next film as a director, The Great Debaters , a biographical drama where he will play a teacher. He turns to the real characters that have worked so well in forging his solid career.