Samuel L. Jackson

Samuel Leroy Jackson was born December 21, 1948, in Washington, D.C., and raised in segregated Chattanooga by his mother and her parents, after his father, an alcoholic he met only twice, stayed in Kansas City. A childhood stutter pushed him toward performance almost by accident; he found he could talk fluently pretending to be someone else. At Morehouse he studied marine biology, then in 1969, a year after ushering at Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral, joined fellow students in holding the Board of Trustees hostage over demands for curriculum reform. He was convicted of unlawful confinement and suspended two years; his mother, reportedly warned he would not survive if he continued Black Power organizing, sent him to Los Angeles. He returned and finished his drama degree in 1972.

After a decade in New York theater and a cocaine and heroin addiction serious enough that his family staged an intervention, Jackson got sober and, in 1991, played a crack addict in Spike Lee's Jungle Fever, a role close enough to his own history that the Cannes jury invented a special award to honor it. Pulp Fiction (1994) made him a star at 45, as Bible-quoting hitman Jules Winnfield, and began a run through Quentin Tarantino's filmography alongside franchise work as Jedi Master Mace Windu in the Star Wars prequels and Nick Fury across eleven Marvel films starting with Iron Man in 2008. By 2022 his films had grossed more than 27 billion dollars worldwide, the highest total of any actor in history, and the Academy gave him an honorary Oscar for work the competitive categories had passed over.

The box-office record and the awards record tell two different stories about the same man. Jackson has exactly one competitive Academy Award nomination in a career spanning more than four decades, for Pulp Fiction, and lost it; the honorary Oscar came instead, a recognition industry observers read as an acknowledgment that the standard categories had simply never caught up to a filmography this large. Much of that filmography is franchise work, Marvel installments, Star Wars prequels, sequels of varying quality, chosen as much for volume and reliable pay as for prestige, a strategy that built the largest career gross in film history without ever building the kind of one-defining-role reputation that usually goes with it. He has stayed sober since the intervention that followed his addiction, more than three decades now.

Jackson, married to actress LaTanya Richardson since 1980, remains one of the busiest actors alive past 75, with new franchise and producing work still on the schedule. In 2019 a DNA test led him to Gabonese citizenship, tracing ancestry to the Benga people, a link his family's slave-trade-era history had erased. Whether the eventual verdict on his career reads as the most bankable actor Hollywood ever produced, or as a serious actor who spent his prestige on volume, is not decided yet, and at his current pace of a film or two a year, it will not be decided for a while.

Samuel L. Jackson's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Jungle Fever film
  Special Cannes Supporting Actor award 1991
• Pulp Fiction film
  Breakout role as Jules Winnfield; his only competitive Oscar nomination 1994
• Star Wars prequel trilogy film
  As Jedi Master Mace Windu, 1999-2005 1999
• Marvel Cinematic Universe film
  As Nick Fury, beginning with Iron Man 2008
• Django Unchained film
  As Stephen, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio 2012

• December 21, 1948 aged 0 Born in Washington, D.C.
• 1968 aged ~20 Ushers at Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral
• 1969 aged ~21 Convicted after the Morehouse trustee hostage-taking, suspended two years
• 1972 aged ~24 Graduates Morehouse with a drama degree
• 1980 aged ~32 Marries LaTanya Richardson
• 1991 aged ~43 Gets sober and stars in Jungle Fever
• 1994 aged ~46 Breaks out in Pulp Fiction
• 2008 aged ~60 Debuts as Nick Fury in Iron Man
• 2022 aged ~74 Receives the Academy Honorary Award

• Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968
  Baptist minister and civil rights leader whose nonviolent activism ended legal segregation in America. ushered at the funeral of
• George Lucas b. 1944
  Filmmaker who created Star Wars and Indiana Jones, later selling Lucasfilm to Disney for over $4 billion. cast as Mace Windu by
• Leonardo DiCaprio b. 1974
  Oscar-winning actor and environmental activist whose career spans blockbusters and prestige dramas. co-starred with in Django Unchained