Not one [black American actor] has ever been seriously challenged to deliver the best that is in him. --James Baldwin The Devil Finds Work, 1975
Throughout the history of American cinema, people who appear in movies seem to have been divided into two categories: actors and black actors. Actors--tacitly understood to mean white actors--played every sort of role in every kind of film, from action heroes to sex sirens, in horror films and period pieces. Black actors, on the other hand, were defined by their race and carefully circumscribed in the parts they could play--usually sidekicks, servants or criminals. Even the few black actors who broke into leading-man roles were confined in various ways. Sidney Poitier, the premier black star of the 1950s and '60s, was all too often limited to moralizing integrationist films. Eddie Murphy, one of the biggest box-office draws of the '80s, has found it difficult to move beyond formulaic comedies.
But Denzel Washington stands apart. At 40, he is one of Hollywood's highest-paid stars, earning $10 million for his next film, the military drama Courage Under Fire, co-starring Meg Ryan. He has been nominated for three Academy Awards, winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in the 1989 Civil War epic Glory. More important than achieving these milestones, however, has been to playing a variety of challenging and not race-specific roles. For every Malcolm X, in which he starred as the slain Muslim leader, there was a Philadelphia, in which he played a homophobic lawyer who just happened to be black. He has shown a facility for Shakespearean comedy (Much Ado About Nothing), as well as for Spike Lee drama (Mo' Better Blues). In just the past four months Washington has had starring roles in three very different films: the submarine drama Crimson Tide, the high-tech thriller Virtuosity and the murder-mystery Devil in a Blue Dress, which opens this week.
Other black actors--Wesley Snipes, Samuel L. Jackson, Laurence Fishburne--have drawn deserved critical acclaim, but none has achieved Washington's mix of box-office clout and acting craft. He is a black actor--proudly, fiercely so--who has succeeded in making that term merely descriptive, not professionally limiting. Few other actors of any color could sincerely say, as Washington does about fellow superstars Kevin Costner and Tom Cruise, "They haven't made any movies that I wanted to make. I haven't felt like I've missed anything." Yet he sees himself not as a standard-bearer but simply as an actor trying to make smart choices and do good work. "I don't do films based on what I think people need," he says. "And I don't consider myself a role model."