actor
Personal Information
Born Lawrence Fishburne III, in July 30, 1961, in Augusta, GA; son of Larry (a corrections officer) and Hattie (a teacher) Fishburne, Jr.; married Hajna Moss (casting agent and producer), c. 1987; divorced; two children.
Career
Actor appearing in motion pictures, including, Cornbread, Earl and Me, 1974, Apocalypse Now, 1979, Death Wish 2, 1982, Rumble Fish, 1983, The Cotton Club, 1984, The Color Purple, 1985 Red Heat, 1985, Gardens of Stone, 1987, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, 1987, Red Heat, 1988, School Daze, 1988, Cadence, 1989, King of New York, 1990, Boyz N the Hood, 1991, Class Action, 1991, Deep Cover, 1992, Searching for Bobby Fischer, 1993, What's Love Got to Do With It, 1993, Higher Learning, 1995, Bad Company, 1995, Just Cause, 1995, Othello, 1995, Fled, 1996, Event Horizon, 1997, Hoodlum, 1997, The Matrix, 1999; in stage productions, including Two Trains Running, 1992, The Tuskegee Airmen, 1995, Miss Evers' Boys, 1997, Always Outnumbered, 1998; and on television, including If You Give a Dance, You Got to Pay the Band, 1972, One Life to Live, 1973-76, A Rumor of War, 1980, For Us the Living, PBS American Playhouse production, 1988, Riff Raff, 1995, The Lion in Winter, 1999, Pee-Wee's Playhouse, Decoration Day, and episodes of Hill Street Blues and Miami Vice.
Life's Work
Since his stage debut at age ten, Laurence Fishburne has spent his life acting. ``He's the kind of actor you can't wait to say action on--because you can't wait to see how he's gonna take it and deal with it,'' director Abel Ferrara said of Laurence Fishburne in a Film Comment interview. The roles Fishburne have chosen have been equally unpredictable, from psychopaths to activist lawyers, from the solid, hands-on father he played in Boyz N the Hood to the troubled cop of Deep Cover. ``For every thug, for every nut, I try and do somebody who's a reasonable person, who's an educated person,'' the actor told Tom Perew of Black Elegance. Perew quoted a casting agent who praised Fishburne's selectivity and dedication: ``I get the feeling he's more interested in the quality behind the work than the money.''
Fishburne was born in 1961, in Augusta, Georgia. His father, a corrections officer, frequently took him to the movies, but it was his mother, a schoolteacher, who introduced him to the stage. The family moved to a middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, when Laurence was young, and soon he was auditioning for parts in local plays. ``I've always been an actor,'' he remarked to James Ryan of Premiere; he informed New York magazine that his first role was in the second grade: ``I was Peter Pan, the boy who never grows up. I still am--I play make-believe for a living.'' At age ten he appeared in the play In My Many Names and Days at the New Federal Theater. ``I played a little 10-year-old baseball freak from Brooklyn who used to dig going to Ebbitts Field and watching Jackie Robinson,'' Fishburne recalled to Washington Post correspondent David Mills.
Fishburne next landed a role in the 1972 television film If You Give a Dance, You Got to Pay the Band, which led to a part on the soap opera One Life to Live when he was 11 years old that lasted three years. One year after joining the daytime series, he appeared in the dramatic film Cornbread, Earl and Me. Fishburne told Patrick Pacheco of the Los Angeles Times that after Cornbread's release, ``My father took all the guys at this juvenile correction facility in the Bronx to see it. Afterward, we got together and they told me that I was doing good, that I had something really fine going on for myself and that if I ever [messed] up, they'd be waiting. That kept me in line.'' The actor earned a part in a Negro Ensemble Theater production and was accepted into the prestigious High School of Performing Arts in New York City. Then, at 15, Fishburne embarked on the acting experience that would utterly transform him: a role as a member of the boat crew in Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now.
Grew up on Apocalypse Set
Pacheco quoted Fishburne as saying that shooting Apocalypse was ``the most formative event'' of his life. He had a chance to observe several luminaries of American film acting--Marlon Brando, Robert DuVall, Martin Sheen, and others--and to consult them for advice. Coppola taught Fishburne that acting ``could be taken seriously, as art, with potential for educating, entertaining and touching people.'' And in the drenching rain and chaos of the filming in the Philippines, Fishburne lived a sporadically unsupervised fantasy of adolescence: ``I was smoking reefer like everybody else,'' he told Pacheco. ``My mother was there with me, but she couldn't control me so she called in the big guns, my father. Everybody in the company referred to him as `the jailer,' but all he had to do was say, `OK, that's enough of that,' and I'd come around.''
Recalling his return to the United States, Fishburne recounted to Ryan, ``I figured I was one of the baddest motherf---ers on the planet. And I came to L.A. and nobody gave a shit. I was really pissed off about that. I couldn't get work. I think a lot of people thought I was crazy, and I probably was.'' Fishburne made the second of what would be a series of appearances in Coppola films, portraying Midget in Rumble Fish, before playing a heavy in Death Wish II. ``I was only getting work playing bad guys, and I wanted to be an actor and didn't want to wait tables,'' he said to Perew. ``But I would have [done so, if necessary].'' In what Mills called Fishburne's ``least dignified professional moment,'' the actor's Death Wish character ``shielded his head with a boom box while fleeing vigilante Charles Bronson.''
Fishburne was concerned with balancing the roles he portrayed and combating Hollywood stereotypes. He succeeded by appearing in two more Coppola films, Gardens of Stone and The Cotton Club, as well as in Steven Spielberg's Color Purple. He also participated in the PBS drama For Us the Living, based on the story of Medgar Evers, a crucial figure in the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Fishburne explained in the Los Angeles Times that ``this is a gig where I had to put myself up and pay my own transportation, but to be involved with Roscoe Lee Browne, Howard Rollins, Dick Anthony Williams, Irene Cara. Well, that was my ancestors saying to me, `OK, here's some work we can do.''' He further confided that ``I work with somebody on what is called `ancestral memory,' and I find it a source of spiritual strength,'' since the struggles of the past ``are not something to be embarrassed by, but a resource to be valued and respected.''
Took Diverse Film Roles
In the meantime, an ambitious young director had been keeping an eye on Fishburne. One day in the mid-1980s, reported Mills, Fishburne was watching a street performance when someone tapped him on the shoulder. ``I don't know who this guy is. He says, `You're Larry Fishburne.... You're a good actor.' So he introduced himself and said he was from Brooklyn and he was making movies.'' The Brooklyn filmmaker was Spike Lee, who wanted Fishburne to appear in a film called Messenger. The movie was never made, but Lee utilized Fishburne in School Daze; the actor played the campus activist Dap in that collegiate musical comedy.
Fishburne later passed up the role of Radio Raheem in Lee's 1988 smash Do the Right Thing, criticizing the film's plot for straying from reality. ``I'm from Brooklyn too,'' he told Mills. ``And I didn't grow up in that kind of Brooklyn.'' Though Fishburne experienced some friction with Lee, the actor's refusal of roles in subsequent Lee films has evidently had more to do with Fishburne's desire for a starring part than any lingering hard feelings.
While working on School Daze, Fishburne met Hajna Moss, a casting agent and producer. The two eventually married and had two children, settling in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Fishburne accepted the role of an orderly in the horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 in order to make the down payment on a house.``My wife likes horror movies, we wanted to buy a house, and they offered me a gig,'' he explained to Ryan. ``[The film's supernatural villain Freddy Krueger] and I never met.'' He and Hajna have since divorced. Fishburne also played a cop in the thriller Red Heat, and, starting in the late 1980s, had the recurring role of the lovable Cowboy Curtis on the Saturday morning television series Pee-Wee's Playhouse. Among his other television projects were the film A Rumor of War and guest appearances on episodes of Hill Street Blues and Miami Vice.
In 1990 Fishburne landed an important role playing ``New Jack Gangster'' Jimmy Jump in Ferrara's King of New York, co-starring Christopher Walken and Wesley Snipes. Though the part was originally written for an Italian-American, Fishburne lobbied for it. ``This cat was funny, enjoyed what he did,'' he said of the character in his interview with Smith, ``he didn't deal drugs, he just killed people--the kind of lovable badman any actor would love to do. I talked to them for about four hours and I said, `Look, young black people who saw School Daze in particular recognize me; there's at least two million of them living in New York, and if you put me in this role, a million of them will go see it, guaranteed, and they'll tell the other million.'' His extravagant performance was evidently as much fun for him to perform as it was for his audience to watch. ``I took some liberty," he admitted to Smith. ``For some people it may seem exaggerated, overblown, like I'm going way over the top with it. But that's real stuff.'' Fishburne also began working with playwright Lanford Wilson in 1990, to develop the character of Sterling in Wilson's Two Trains Running.
True to his commitment to balance the cinematic ``nuts'' with responsible characters, Fishburne played an attorney working for activist lawyer Gene Hackman in Michael Apted's 1991 film Class Action. People correspondent Ralph Novak felt that Fishburne and the rest of the supporting cast were ``first teamers.'' Sight and Sound praised ``a perfectly formed performance from Larry Fishburne, a great black actor spoiling for a part in something really big.'' Fishburne also appeared in Martin Sheen's Cadence, a military drama co-starring Sheen and his son Charlie. ``Fishburne, as leader of the black stockade residents, has a sly Jack Nicholson-like way of ingratiating himself,'' opined Novak.
Gained Recognition With Boyz
Fishburne's next big project was Boyz N The Hood, a film directed by then-23-year-old John Singleton, who had been a production assistant on Pee-Wee's Playhouse. As Furious Styles, the entrepreneur-activist father who guides his son out of trouble and into responsibility, Fishburne earned rave reviews. Sight and Sound declared, ``Larry Fishburne continues to be a matchless screen presence in the central role of Furious,'' while Stanley Kauffmann of the New Republic wrote that the actor ``brings an even-tempered, unforced authority to the role.''
Even critics who disliked the film's tone admired Fishburne's work. Novak noted that Fishburne ``acts his way through most of Singleton's verbiage, conveying the determination of a father trying to give his son a chance.'' Edmond Grant of Films in Review lamented that ``the finest actor in the film ... gets the corniest role.'' While admitting that Fishburne ``does bring some depth to the role,'' Grant was disturbed that Furious functioned primarily as ``an obvious mouthpiece for Singleton's concerns.'' Christine Dolen of the Detroit Free Press observed that with Boyz Fishburne ``seemed to leap, like a major movie star at the height of his power, from the screen into our startled and appreciative consciousness.'' Yet Fishburne is quoted in the same piece as saying that ``Boyz N The Hood did take my career to a different level. But I did what I've been doing for the last 20 years. I think it was the power of the whole film. I give the credit to the writing and the execution of that film.''
Won Awards for Stage Role
In his next role in Lanford Wilson's stage play Two Trains Running, which opened on Broadway in 1992, Fishburne won a Tony Award for best featured actor in a play and also picked up Outer Critic's Circle, Drama Desk, and Theater World awards. As Sterling, an ex-convict espousing the black empowerment philosophy of civil rights activist Malcolm X, Fishburne once again stunned the critics. Frank Rich of the New York Times wrote that the actor ``greets each of Sterling's defeats with pride and heroic optimism'' and called Fishburne and his co-star Roscoe Lee Browne ``the jewels of the production.''
Perew claimed that Fishburne's work in Two Trains Running ``should convince any doubters that Larry Fishburne will forever play lead roles'' and added, ``watching the play, you get black history the way Sterling has seen it. Fishburne is quirky, insightful, often humorous and, finally, a profound Sterling.'' Of the role, the actor himself stated in his interview with Pacheco that ``Sterling's a man with an idea, and that's what makes him dangerous,'' and that the character has ``just got out of jail, he's got no money and he's got no job. When a brother's got to get himself a hustle, that makes him dangerous.'' He told Dolen that working with Browne, Wilson, and director Lloyd Richards was a bigger thrill than winning a Tony: ``This is the longest time I've worked in the theater. It's the most exciting; it requires real discipline and develops your concentration to a level that I know when I come off this, no matter what the part is in what movie, I'll be able to do it. Because I feel like a bona fide actor now.''
Played a Deep Character in Deep Cover
Returning to film in 1992, Fishburne portrayed a genuinely challenging character in Deep Cover: Russell Stevens, Jr., an undercover cop who gets drawn into the world of drug-dealing and begins to lose his moral bearings. Director Bill Duke found Fishburne's subtlety and range perfect for the part: ``Larry can show a side of himself that will do whatever is necessary to get what he wants. He becomes as ferocious a bad guy as [he does] a cop. Looking in Larry's eyes, you don't see a lie, and that's what you want in an actor,'' Duke observed to Ryan, adding that he found Fishburne ``confident but not egotistical.'' Commenting on Duke's improvisational, actor-centered approach, Fishburne observed in an Entertainment Weekly profile, ``It's collaborative here. Everyone throws in his two cents.'' Duke contended in the same article that Fishburne was at first uneasy with the director's approach: ``Larry hated working with me in the beginning. He's used to rehearsing a scene the way it's going to be shot. I said, `Larry, that's not how I work.' It always made him nervous, but he started to trust me and we had a good collaboration.''
Fishburne himself found playing Stevens a rich opportunity. ``What makes Stevens special for me,'' he told Ryan, ``is he's a cop and he's a criminal at the same time. He has to do bad in order to do good. White actors get to play this type of stuff a lot, and we don't. It's an opportunity to show up and be a man on the screen--not a black man, not a white man, not a superman, just a man.'' Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly pointed to Fishburne's performance as one of the strengths of a film he judged inconsistent: ``Fishburne, with his hair-trigger line readings and deadly reptilian gaze, conveys the controlled desperation of someone watching his faith unravel.''
Gives Multi-Layered Performances
In 1993, Fishburne again played a character with a dark side when he starred opposite Angela Bassett in the movie version of singer Tina Turner's autobiography, What's Love Got to Do With It. Although he initially turned down the role of Turner's abusive husband, Ike, because it was too one-sidedly evil to be realistic, the opportunity to work with Bassett again (they acted opposite each other in Boyz N the Hood) proved to be too much of a draw. But rather than accept the flat character, Fishburne reworked his portrayal of Ike to demonstrate the humanizing charm which made Ike so attractive prior to his descent into drug abuse and violence. Rita Kempley of the Washington Post said, "Fishburne's performance is astounding for the humanity he brings to the thinly-drawn Ike." That same year he stepped down from star billing in order to play a streetsmart chess player in Searching for Bobby Fischer. Fishburne's character mentors a young chess prodigy who resists outside pressure to play chess competitively.
The year 1995 was a full one for the actor as six of his projects came to life. In a career move not unlike his decision to act in For Us the Living, Fishburne took a pay cut in order to lend the weight of his celebrity to the HBO movie The Tuskegee Airmen. He played Hannibal Lee, a pilot who endures racial prejudice in the course of his flying career with the all-black 99th Squadron of the 332d Fighter Group of the U.S. Air Force during World War II. Fishburne earned an Emmy nomination for his performance in this dramatization of the real-life elite fighting unit.
For the movie Higher Learning, Fishburne once again teamed up with director John Singleton to play a West Indian professor at an American university that is a racial and ideological war zone. Although the role of Professor Phipps is a smaller one in the film, critic Roger Ebert remarked that Fishburne's portrayal is "all the more effective because it is so subtle." While some critics found Singleton's characterizations rigidly stereotypical and the plot overblown, Fishburne was singled out in reviews time and again as outstanding.
Neither did critics fault Fishburne for the flaws of two 1995 thrillers Bad Company and Just Cause, in which he plays men immersed in illegal activities. In Bad Company, also starring Ellen Barkin, he is the newest recruit in an underworld company that specializes in industrial spying. The betrayals come fast and furious, but critics were largely unimpressed with the complicated plot and the emphasis on sex and violence. While commenting that "the film is a bore, a brute, a dullard," Washington Post critic Hal Hinson also noted, "with his panther glide and lounge-lizard eyes, Fishburne has become one of film's most mesmerizing stars." Just Cause, a suspense thriller about a law professor's investigation of a murder conviction in a Southern backwater town, was likewise criticized for being all plot and no substance. However, Fishburne's performance as the sadistic police chief who beats a confession out of the suspect, inspired Mike LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle to write, "Fishburne is scary enough in his own right. His performance, the most complex and fascinating in the film, never stops revealing layers of a character who on first glance seems a standard villain."
Plays First Black Othello on Screen
Fishburne generated a cinematic "first" when he became the first African American to play Shakespeare's Othello on the silver screen. Following in the footsteps of such legendary actors as Sir Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles, Fishburne brought the Moor Othello to life in the 1995 production which also starred Kenneth Branagh as Iago and Irene Jacob as Desdemona. While critics debated the merits of this version which cut the play by a third, Fishburne received good reviews for a role he admitted scared him initially. "It's definitely scary before you start. And harder to shake off afterwards. After all, Othello has been around for almost 400 years," he remarked in an interview with Insight on the News. Even though some critics faulted his inexperience with Elizabethan English for the diminished impact of his lines, the sheer charisma of Fishburne's screen presence won over audiences. Janet Matlin of the New York Times wrote, "With no previous Shakespearean experience, he at first displays an improbable loftiness, sounding very much the rarified thespian beside Mr. Branagh's deceptively regular Joe. But Mr. Fishburne's performance has a dangerous edge that ultimately works to its advantage, and he smolders movingly through the most anguished parts of the role."
Takes Stage Roles
But not content with film and television, Fishburne expanded his acting credits to include the stage when his own play, Riff Raff, appeared at the Off-Broadway Circle Repertory Theater. Fishburne wrote the script about two half-brothers hiding from the law in a friend's apartment in just eight days while filming Just Cause, and earned praise for its sharp dialogue and compelling story. In an enthusiastic review, New York Times critic Ben Brantley wrote "It is a relief to learn that Mr. Fishburne doesn't need a big screen or someone else's script to tell a story compellingly." Fishburne also directed and starred in the production. In 1999, he returned to the stage when he starred in the play The Lion in Winter at the Roundabout Theater Company in New York City.
Returns to Film with Fled
In 1996, Fishburne's participation in the buddy movie, Fled, was universally acknowledged as a step down in the quality of films the actor typically chose as critics lambasted the movie as brainless, cliched, and violent. Fishburne played the convict Piper, who escapes from a chain gang while manacled to fellow convict, Dodge. Together, they must elude the pursuing authorities and underworld figures in order to retrieve millions of dollars Dodge stole from the Cuban-American Mafia. Once again critics distanced the actor from the faults of the movie; after dwelling on improbable plot developments and poor dialogue, Roger Ebert commented that "Laurence Fishburne brings an authority to his role that the screenplay doesn't really deserve."
In 1997, Fishburne became involved with another HBO movie based on historical facts when he starred with Alfre Woodard in Miss Evers' Boys. The story is based on an actual medical experiment conducted by the government between 1932 and 1972, in which African American men suffering from syphilis were left untreated so that the effects of the disease could be studied. Woodard played the nurse, Miss Evers, who acts as friend and confidante to the men while, at the same time, she is aware of the deception her participation in the experiment necessitates. Fishburne played one of the victims of the experiment who becomes Miss Evers' romantic interest.
Violent Movies Take Critical Hit
Two graphically violent movies finished off 1997 for Fishburne: Event Horizon and Hoodlum. Neither movie was a darling of the critics who complained about the poor plots and gratuitous bloodletting. Event Horizon, a science fiction-horror movie about a space ship which disappears and mysteriously returns seven years later with the presence of pure evil on board, received special attention for its extreme gore, chaotic plot, and breathtaking special effects. In the movie, Fishburne played the commander of the crew sent to investigate the mysterious spacecraft. Variety critic Joe Leydon noted that the actor "perform[s] far beyond the call of duty, but to little avail," finding that "[the] initial promise of the offbeat premise...is rapidly dissipated by routine execution and risible dialogue." Hoodlum suffered much the same critical fate. The plot to that movie revolved around a Harlem gangster's attempt to thwart a white gangster's coup of the lucrative Harlem numbers game during the Depression. Fishburne, playing gangster Bumpy Johnson, lent an "instrinsic appeal" to a film which was described by Mike LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle as "an overlong gangster movie, a bloated and often laughable attempt at an epic."
Plays Positive African American Roles
Fishburne returned to the medium of some of his most lauded work when he played a compassionate ex-convict in the HBO movie Always Outnumbered. Based on stories by acclaimed African American author Walter Mosely, the story follows Socrates Fortlow-Fishburne's character-as he attempts to help his community after serving nearly thirty years in jail. The positive portrayal of African American men is particularly important to Fishburne who acknowledged in a Jet article the scarcity of such images in movies. "Socrates is a character who reminds people that not all [African American men] are ignorant, not all of us beat up women, not all of us are what you would think we are. Most of us are decent human beings."
Fishburne closed out the century in the reality-bending science-fiction thriller, The Matrix. Also starring Keanu Reeves, the cerebral action movie concerns a group of rebels who are trying to expose the matrix, a virtual reality which has been imposed on humanity by a machine to fool them into believing that they are free. Fishburne is Morpheus, the leader of this collection of renegades, who recruits Reeves's character to spearhead the rebellion. While the movie raised many philosophical issues, critics complained that it retreated from deeper explorations of the subjects of identity and reality in favor of high-gloss action sequences.
Fishburne has emerged in the 1990s as an African American actor of considerable talent whose name and reputation are worthy of top billing in whatever project he chooses. Unlike the black actors of yesteryear, Fishburne has proven that he does not need the support of a better-known white actor to draw in audiences, and, even when handicapped with less-than-average scripts, he manages to bowl over critics with his range and intelligence. As an advocate for positive African American images, Fishburne has successfully brought to life stories of significance to the African American community while breaking into roles not originally earmarked for black actors. With his versatility and depth, Fishburne will likely continue finding success as one of Hollywood's leading men.
Awards
Selected Awards: Tony Award for best featured actor in a play, Outer Critic's Circle Award, Drama Desk Award, and Theater World Award, all 1992, all for Two Trains Running.
Further Reading
Books
- Current Biography Yearbook, 1996.
Periodicals- Back Stage, March 26, 1999.
- Black Elegance, June/July 1992.
- Chicago Sun-Times, January 11, 1995; December 29, 1995.
- Detroit Free Press, June 2, 1992.
- Entertainment Weekly, April 24, 1992.
- Film Comment, July/August 1990.
- Films in Review, February 1992.
- Insight on the News, January 15, 1996.
- Jet, July 15, 1991; February 24, 1997; March 23, 1998..
- Los Angeles Times, January 12, 1992.
- New Republic, September 2, 1991.
- Newsweek, July 15, 1991.
- New York, July 22, 1991.
- New York Times, April 14, 1992.
- Parade, June 28, 1992.
- People, March 25, 1991; April 1, 1991; July 22, 1991.
- Premiere, May 1992.
- San Francisco Chronicle, August 4, 1995; August 27, 1997.
- Sight and Sound, July 1991; August 1991; November 1991.
- Time, May 11, 1992.
- Variety, August 18, 1997.
- Video Review, March 1992.
- Washington Post, July 7, 1991; June 11, 1993; January 20, 1995; December 29, 1995.
- Additional information obtained from a press biography on Fishburne.
— Simon Glickman
— Rebecca Parks
