actor; fashion model
Personal Information
Born in 1964 in Cotenou, Benin, the son of Pierre (a cook), and Albertine Hounsou
Education: Attended schools in Lyons, France, c. 1977-84.
Career
Fashion and photographer's model, France and the United States, 1987-93; actor, 1990-.
Life's Work
Djimon Hounsou, from the West African nation of Benin, stands on the brink of becoming the first black African international movie star. Hounsou's performance in the historical epic Amistad was widely praised and drew much attention to the previously little known actor. Directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Debbie Allen, Amistad told the true story of a bloody uprising on a slave ship bound for Cuba in 1839. The captured Africans demanded that the crew members remaining alive take the ship back to Africa. Instead, the crew sailed north to the United States where the Africans were jailed while their fate was decided in a court battle pitting American abolitionists against pro-slavery forces who viewed the Africans as property belonging to slaveholders. Hounsou played Cinque, the leader of the revolt. The film also starred Morgan Freeman as an African American observing events, Anthony Hopkins as John Quincy Adams, the former president who pleaded the cause of the Africans before the Supreme Court, and Matthew McConaughey as a fervently Abolitionist attorney. "It is a great movie that should be seen because it enables us to get in touch with a history that is only 160 years in our past. Like Roots, it forces us to look reality in the face," wrote B.B. Robinson about Amistad in the Chicago Independent Bulletin. S. Allen Counter in the Bay State Banner called Hounsou "the reincarnation of Cinque" adding that "Amistad deals in a straightforward and honest manner with the most neglected subject of the American past, namely unrequited chattel slavery. More importantly, it informs the subject and demonstrates better than any other film on American slavery how much good can be achieved when persons of different racial and religious backgrounds work together for what is right."
Djimon Hounsou (pronounced JI-mon HON-sou) was born in Cotenou, Benin, in 1964, the youngest of five children. His father's occupation as a cook made the family relatively prosperous by West African standards. "We were not a rich African family. Everything was very basic. If you knew the way I lived then, and the way I'm living now... it's day and night," Hounsou told Lindsay Bishop of Venice. Hounsou grew up speaking French and several dialects of Goun, the Beninois language. The packed movie showings in his television-less home village got him thinking about a career in show business. "Once you were in you couldn't move. Every space was filled with people. That's when I knew I wanted to be an entertainer," Hounsou told Carol Day of People.
At the age of thirteen, Hounsou was sent to Lyons, France to live with an older brother and study to become a doctor. To the great disappointment of his family, he proved to be a lackadaisical student with no interest in medicine. "I wanted a different life from the one my family planned," Hounsou told Day. Leaving school at age twenty, Hounsou drifted to Paris after being thrown out of the house by his brother. Without a place to live or working papers that allowed him to get a job, Hounsou found himself sleeping on benches and bathing in fountains. "Going through people's garbage at night to find a piece of bread to eat--that was not a pretty sight. I didn't want any trouble with the police, so I kept a low profile," Hounsou told Daniel J. Sharfstein of the New York Times. After living on the street for over a year, Hounsou's impressive, six-foot two-inch physique was noticed by a passerby who handed him the business card of a photographer. Hounsou followed up on the idea. "I never pictured myself that good-looking [but] I had nothing to lose," Hounsou told Day. Hounsou's photograph was circulated to modeling agencies and he soon found himself on fashion show runways and appearing in an advertisement campaign for designer Thierry Mugler. "It's a very surreal world, modeling, but it kept me off the streets, literally," Hounsou said in an interview posted on the Irish Film and Television Net Web site.
From Model to Actor
Hounsou's work with Mugler led to his being cast in three music videos directed by David Fincher: Steve Winwood's "Roll with It," Madonna's "Express Yourself," and Paula Abdul's "Straight Up." The videos got the attention of noted photographer Herb Ritts and Hounsou soon became one of Ritts' favorite models. For Ritts' book Men and Women, Hounsou posed with an octopus on the top of his head. "At the time I didn't speak English, so I didn't understand what [Ritts] was talking about, what octopus meant," Hounsou said to Bishop. "And they brought in this big container. I was looking at him and trying to communicate with my face like 'What?!?!'...In less than ten minutes he got the picture. The picture came out. It was a beautiful photo. At the time I didn't think so, but it was nice working with him." Hounsou worked with Ritts again on Janet Jackson's video "Love Will Never Do Without You." Ritts said of Hounsou to Sharfstein: "I just loved his inner soul in combination with his physical stature. He has an incredible sensitivity. The way he make shapes - he really understands his body. That comes from an inner sense."
In 1990, Hounsou moved to Los Angeles, hoping to break into acting. He began taking drama classes and taught himself English by listening to the narration on cable television documentaries. "The first few years when I was learning English I had to think in French before I said the things I wanted to say in English. Now I dream mostly in English. Now it's almost the reverse. I have to think in English now to write in French sometimes," Hounsou told Bishop. In the United States, Hounsou found his race mattered much more, to both whites and other black people, than it had in France. "It never occurred to me that there was a way to behave 'black' in order to be black.... That was one of my first encounters with, I guess, the American lifestyle. It was difficult for me. Growing up in France, I was just a human being. I came here and they tell you, 'Hey, he behaves like a white boy.' I didn't know there was a way to be black. So that was shocking," Hounsou told Bishop.
Hounsou's first film appearance came in comedienne Sandra Bernhard's screen adaptation of her Off-Broadway show Without You I'm Nothing in 1990. Hounsou, who could not yet speak English, played the silent role of Bernhard's ex-boyfriend. He then landed small roles in 1992's Unlawful Entry, a crime thriller starring Kurt Russell, and in the 1994 science fiction film Stargate, also starring Russell.
Cast in Amistad
It was Amistad, director Steven Spielberg's highly touted follow up to his Academy Award winning based-on-truth Holocaust story Schindler's List, that brought Hounsou to the attention of the public. Making a movie out of the story of the Amistad uprising was the idea of dancer/actress Debbie Allen, who produced the film. While browsing through the bookstore at her alma mater Howard University several years ago, Allen happened upon the book Black Mutiny: The Revolt of the Schooner Amistad by William A. Owens. "I was inspired, overwhelmed and upset that I had not heard the story," Allen told Bennie M. Currie of American Visions. Allen acquired the film rights to Owens' book but found no movie studio interested in the Amistad tale. Finally, she took the idea to Spielberg. He was willing to help get the project off the ground but was reluctant to direct the film himself, suspecting that a black director might be more appropriate. Allen disagreed. "I think if there was a ever a movie done by a man who understands people in bondage, people suffering, people overcoming, it was Schindler's List. And besides, I needed a hot, strong filmmaker--someone who could handle a story that was epic," Allen explained to Currie.
In landing the role of Cinque, Hounsou won out over more than one hundred actors who auditioned for the role. "Djimon just has an enduring quality, a real sense of destiny. He's extremely powerful and charismatic and charming. I saw him, and he was just how I imagined Cinque to look and sound.... He was Cinque at first sight," Spielberg told Sharfstein. Cinque speaks just a single line of English in the entire film: "Give us free!" The rest of the role is in Mende, a West African language spoken in Sierra Leone, the area from which Cinque was taken. Though Hounsou's native tongue, Goun, is also West African, it is no closer to Mende than English is to French. Hounsou was given only ten days to learn the basics of Mende. This linguistic chore added to the pressure of tackling his first major acting assignment. "It was very hard. I would go home every night and work, work, work on the script, and then sometimes I would show up the next day feeling disappointed in myself. Morgan Freeman gave me good advice. He said acting is like life, and that some days you are good at it, and some days you just have to get through by doing the best you can," Hounsou told Terry Lawson of the Knight- Ridder/Tribune News Service. Hounsou viewed Cinque as an ordinary man. "He never intended to lead this whole thing in the first place. He only did what he did to free himself. I don't really like that he's called a slave, because there's no such thing in Cinque's mind as being a slave. He's somebody who never chose to be anything but a human being," Hounsou told Scharfstein.
Freeman found that Hounsou completed his task with flying colors. "Djimon's perfect. He'll be on people's minds for a while. What he's personifying is the strength and conviction of a person who's decided: 'This is not my destiny. This is not my fate, My destiny is not in the hull of this ship,'" Freeman told Scharfstein. Matthew McConaughey was similarly impressed by Hounsou. "He's completely unaffected. He was so good and so raw because of what he did not know. He had a range. He could make the transition from fear to weeping in all sincerity. And that was innate for him. I don't know where it comes from. He's also one of the most sensitive and compassionate men I've ever met," McConaughey told Andy Seiler of USA Today.
Released in December 1997, Amistad garnered mostly favorable reviews. "If you were wondering what Steven Spielberg could possibly do for an encore after Schindler's List, the answer is Amistad. If the first film finally established his credentials as a serious filmmaker as well as a master fabricator of big pop entertainments, Amistad confirms them. It's a big, bold noble juggernaut of a film that literally and figuratively brings to light a pivotal piece of American history," wrote Jay Carr in the Boston Globe. The film did only modest business at the box office and was far outdistanced by a more sensational based-on-fact film, Titanic, which was released at approximately the same time.
Continued Acting Career
After completing Amistad, Hounsou appeared in Ill Gotten Gains, another slave story, this one a low-budget feature directed by young newcomer Joel Marsden and co-starring Eartha Kitt. Deep Rising, a horror film Hounsou made before Amistad, was released in early 1998. The pride he feels towards his association with Amistad has made him more choosy about future projects. He explained to Lawson: "Yes, I want to work, because that is the only way my acting will improve. But I can't just take a job now to work. I need to be very careful not to screw this up."
After playing a non-English speaking man in Amistad, Hounsou found that Hollywood producers were surprised with his ability to act in English. That difficulty and Hounsou's desire to play a variety of different parts has made his job search in Hollywood a challenge. He told USA Today that moviemakers in Hollywood "think of you as a black artist, not an artist, and that's crippling. You have to fight and fight for them to think of a role as being black because they've been thinking white, white, white." Despite these challenges, Hounsou has played a variety of characters in more recent films, including Gladiator (2000), The Four Feathers (2002), Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003), and Biker Boyz (2003), among others. But it was Hounsou's 2003 work in In America that earned him a great deal more praise. For his portrayal of Mateo, a painter who is dying of AIDS living next door to an Irish immigrant family, Hounsou won awards for best supporting actor, and was even nominated for an Oscar. He played Mateo as a mysterious, gentle man. "Think dignity," director Jim Sheridan told Hounsou about the character, according to Entertainment Weekly: "I wanted to get that spiritual aspect. He's very powerful."
In his private life, Hounsou shares a Beverly Hills apartment with his girlfriend, actress/screenwriter Victoria Mahoney. He enjoys working out at the gym, horseback riding, and polo.
Awards
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Image Award, for outstanding actor in a motion picture for Amistad, 1998; Independent Spirit Award, for best supporting actor, 2004; Golden Satellite Award, for In America, 2004; Black Reel Award, for In America, 2004.
Further Reading
Periodicals
- American Visions, December 1997-January 1998, p. 39.
- Amsterdam News (New York), January 7, 1998, p. 20.
- Bay State Banner (Boston), August 12, 1998, p. 26.
- Boston Globe, December 12, 1997, p. C1.
- Calgary Sun, January 2, 1998; May 1, 2000.
- Chicago Independent Bulletin, February 12, 1998, p. 13.
- Detroit News, December 12, 1997.
- Entertainment Weekly, February 6, 2004.
- Jet, February 16, 2004.
- Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service, December 8, 1997.
- Maclean's, December 15, 1997, p. 62.
- New Republic, December 22, 1997, p. 24.
- Newsweek, December 8, 1997, p. 64.
- New York Times, December 7, 1997.
- Oakland Post, December 24, 1997, p. 8.
- People, December 15, 1997, p. 19; January 12, 1998, p. 82.
- Time, December 15, 1997, p. 108.
- USA Today, December 9, 1997, p. D1; July 2, 1999.
- Variety, December 2, 1997, p. 27; December 8, 1997, p. 110.
- Venice, December 1997, p. 36-40.
On-line- Irish Film and Television Net, www.iftn.ie (June 3, 2004).)
Other- Other Information also provided by Rogers and Cowan Publicity Agency.
— Tom and Sara Pendergast
