The Full Biography
Eddie Murphy. Comic. Actor. The Brooklyn kid who made Saturday Night Live a one-man weather system, then spent the next decades learning how to be on a stage again after the movies had made him a corporation.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a red leather suit, or Axel Foley in a trucker’s hat, or a man doing an entire barbershop by himself. The years were 1980 to 1988. What the still cannot show is Edward Regan Murphy of Bushwick and Roosevelt, Long Island, a child of a broken house who treated a microphone like a way out, and a life of family-film money, a long quiet, Dolemite Is My Name, and a stand-up hour he finally took back.
He was born on April 3, 1961, in Brooklyn. Charles Murphy, a New York City transit officer and amateur comic, died when Eddie was eight; the official story was a woman and a knife, a death the family has had to carry in more than one version. Lillian, his mother, became ill. The boys — Eddie and Charlie — went to a foster home for a stretch and then to Roosevelt, Long Island, when Lillian married Vernon Lynch, a factory foreman. The second house had a yard and a stepfather who kept a job. Eddie was funny in the way a kid is funny when the alternative is being small. He worked the Comic Strip on the island and in the city while he was still a teenager. He learned that a microphone is a way to leave a room without leaving it.
The door was 30 Rockefeller Plaza, 1980. He was nineteen. Saturday Night Live had lost the first church — Belushi, Aykroyd, Gilda — and needed a new temperature. He gave it one. Buckwheat. Gumby. James Brown. Velvet Jones. An entire barbershop in one body. He was, for a stretch, the reason people watched a show that had been about to become a memory. He hosted while he was still in the cast. He left in 1984 as a movie star who still owed the club an hour. The hours came. They are still the documents.
48 Hrs. (1982), for Walter Hill, opposite Nick Nolte, is a convict named Reggie Hammond in a borrowed suit, a buddy picture that is also a Black man walking into a redneck bar and taking the room. Trading Places (1983), for John Landis, with Dan Aykroyd and Jamie Lee Curtis, is a street hustler swapped with a broker for a bet, a comedy that understood class better than it announced. Then Beverly Hills Cop (1984), for Martin Brest. Axel Foley, a Detroit detective in a city of valet stands, a fish-out-of-water that is really a grin used as a weapon. It was the highest-grossing picture in America that year. He was twenty-three. He was the biggest movie star comedy had produced, and he was not yet the corporation.
The stand-up specials are the throat under the hits. Delirious (1983), a red leather suit, a packed room, an hour that other comics still steal from and argue with. Raw (1987), at the Felt Forum, is colder, longer, a man who has already become a climate and is still working the club as if the club could kill him. The jokes about family, about gay men, about women, about the house he came from, are the file a complete life has to hold. A lot of first-wave fans want only the leather. A lot of second-wave rooms want the hour disowned. He has not recanted the craft. He has, in the decades since, changed what he is willing to do with it. Both facts stay.
The rest of the 1980s is a run. The Golden Child (1986). Beverly Hills Cop II (1987). Coming to America (1988), for Landis, as Prince Akeem and half the barbershop, a fairy tale about a man who leaves a palace to find a life, which is a joke only if you miss that the comic had already left Roosevelt. Arsenio Hall is the partner in the frame. James Earl Jones is the king. The picture is still a civic object at weddings and on weekends. Harlem Nights (1989) was the one he wrote and directed, with Richard Pryor in the building, a period comedy that the town treated as a disappointment and that he has had to carry as the night he tried to be the whole firm. Another 48 Hrs. (1990). The run had already peaked. He was not yet thirty.
The 1990s and 2000s paid him to be a brand. Boomerang (1992) with Halle Berry. The Distinguished Gentleman (1992). Vampire in Brooklyn (1995). Then The Nutty Professor (1996), a Jekyll-and-Hyde fat suit that was also a family, a Sherman Klump who is kind and a Buddy Love who is the 1980s grin used against itself. It was a vast hit. Dr. Dolittle (1998) and its sequel talked to animals. Bowfinger (1999), for Frank Oz, with Steve Martin, is the sharpest of the period: a movie star and a wannabe, a Hollywood joke told from both sides of the rope. Shrek (2001) made Donkey a second corporation, a voice that children who had never seen Axel could quote. The sequels paid. Daddy Day Care (2003). The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002) is the invoice that did not cash. Dreamgirls (2006), as James “Thunder” Early, brought an Oscar nomination and a singing performance the town had not filed him for. Norbit (2007) is the picture a lot of rooms will not forgive. He took the work. Some of it is funny. Some of it is a hiding place. He became, for a while, a man who did not need a club and therefore almost forgot the club.
Then the quiet, and then the return. He hosted Saturday Night Live again in 2019, a night the show treated as a restoration. Dolemite Is My Name (2019), for Craig Brewer, put him back in a room that required craft, not a sequel number. He is Rudy Ray Moore, a man who also had to will a career into existence, a biopic about a comic who made his own myth because the industry would not. Wesley Snipes, Keegan-Michael Key, and a Los Angeles of the 1970s sit around him. The performance is the one that told the town he had not misplaced the instrument. Coming 2 America (2021) was a victory lap with Arsenio again. You People (2023). Candy Cane Lane (2023). Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (2024) put the trucker’s hat back on a man in his sixties and asked whether the grin still worked as a weapon. It did, in spots. The 2023 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, at the Kennedy Center, was the civic object the town uses when it has decided a comic is now an institution. He took it. He did not pretend a prize is an hour.
I’m not trying to send any messages. I’m just trying to make people laugh.Eddie Murphy
The turn is the quiet and the return. A lot of first-wave SNL men died or calcified. Murphy got rich enough to disappear and then, unusually, got interested again. The work of the last decade is not as cruel as Raw. It is a man who has children and a catalog and still wants the laugh to be earned.
Six things most people never knew
- Roosevelt, Long Island, is the second address. Bushwick first. A foster stretch. The club came after a house that had already broken.
- He was nineteen on SNL. The temperature change was a teenager’s. The rest of the cast had to catch up.
- Delirious and Raw are the documents, not the merchandising. The movies made the corporation. The hours made the voice.
- Axel Foley is a Detroit joke in a California suit. The fish-out-of-water is the plot. The grin is the weapon.
- The family-film years were a choice and a hiding place. Donkey paid. The club waited.
- Dolemite is the door back in. 2019. A biopic about a man who also had to will a career into existence. Then the hour became possible again.
He has many children — Bria, Myles, Shayne, Zola, Bella, Christian, and the rest of a large household — and a private life that the 1980s tabloids treated as a second special. He married Nicole Mitchell in 1993; they divorced in 2006. He married Paige Butcher in 2024 after a long partnership and more children. He has been, in the interviews of the return, blunter about what the first fame cost and what the quiet repaired. Friends from the club days describe a man who could be generous in a room and gone by Tuesday. He is still gone a lot. He shows up when the part is a part.
The later years
Home, after the long quiet, has been a California compound and a calendar that opened again when he decided the corporation was not the whole throat. He did not become a man who issued a comeback statement and then took every sequel. He became a man who picked: Dolemite first, because the part required acting; Akeem again, because the fairy tale still had a joke in it; Axel again, because the hat is a civic object and he still owns the grin that made it one. Between the pictures there have been years of not working in public, which the town reads as disappearance and which a father of a large household may also read as a schedule.
The stage is the unfinished chapter and the one that matters to the people who remember the leather. He has talked, across the last fifteen years, about an hour that would be an hour, not a clip, not a host monologue, not a prize-night medley. He has workshopped. He has not flooded clubs the way a hungry comic does. He does not need the door money. He needs, if he needs anything, a set that can stand next to Delirious without being a costume replica of it. The Mark Twain night was a civic hug. An hour would be a job. Friends who have seen bits describe a man who is funnier, and kinder, and still capable of a blade. He has not owed the country another Raw. He has started paying the country another hour in pieces: SNL, a camera, a room that goes quiet when he wants it to.
He is in his sixties. The red leather is a museum piece. The barbershop voices still work; he can still do a man and then the man next to him and then the shop. Donkey still prints money in a child’s mouth. Axel still walks into a Beverly Hills station and treats procedure as a suggestion. James Thunder Early still has the one Oscar nomination the town gave a man it had filed as a grin. The children are grown enough to have seen the clips and the father. Charlie, his brother and the comic who kept the family joke going on television, died in 2017. That death is in the file of the quiet. He has not made it a tour. He has made it a reason to choose the next part more carefully.
What he has not done is retire the threat. The country now reads the face as uncle and still as the teenager who took SNL. Both readings are incomplete. The man in the compound is a professional who got rich enough to vanish and then, unlike most people who get that rich, got interested again. Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is not a last will. It is a man checking whether the weapon still fires. Dolemite was the proof of craft. The next hour, if he finishes it the way the club taught him, will be the proof of throat. He does not owe the proof. He has started offering it anyway. That is the chapter. The corporation was the middle. The microphone was the first room and may be the last one he still wants.
He shows up when the part is a part. He disappears when the part is a product. The town, which paid him to be a product for twenty years, is having to relearn the difference. A lot of comics his age are a greatest-hits walk. He is, instead, a man in his sixties who still treats a laugh as something that has to be earned in the room, even when the room is a streaming service and the hat is forty years old. That is not nostalgia. That is a standard. He learned it at the Comic Strip before the corporation had a name.
After the spotlight moved
It moved to the Shrek merchandising and then came back when he wanted it. Every young comic still has to decide what to do with Raw. Every cop comedy still owes Axel a royalty it will not pay. SNL still uses his season as a measurement.
He came out of Bushwick and Roosevelt, took a late-night stage at nineteen, made a cop and a prince and a professor, got rich enough to vanish, and then came back as Dolemite and as himself. If you only remember the leather, you have the special. If you remember nineteen, the quiet, and the second hour, you have him.
Portrait: David Shankbone · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons