The Full Biography
Samuel L. Jackson. Actor. The Chattanooga kid who got sober, quoted Scripture as a hit man, and then held two galaxies together with a patch and a glare.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a man in a black suit, gun on the table, speaking Ezekiel as if the verse had been written for a diner in Los Angeles. The year was 1994. The picture was Pulp Fiction. The face was forty-five and already tired in a useful way. What the still cannot show is Samuel Leroy Jackson of Washington, D.C., and Chattanooga, a Morehouse man who had locked a college president in his office, a working actor who lost a decade to cocaine, and a living professional whose entire famous catalog was made after he put the pipe down.
He was born on December 21, 1948, in Washington, D.C., and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, by his mother, Elizabeth, and his grandparents. The father was not in the house. The first pressure was a Southern city that had rules and a grandmother who had standards. He went to Riverside High, then to Morehouse College in Atlanta, the same campus that had shaped Martin Luther King Jr. In 1969, in the weather after King’s assassination, Jackson was among the students who held Morehouse’s board of trustees — including Martin Luther King Sr. — in a building until the school answered demands. He has never filed that week as a stunt. He has filed it as the year a theater student learned what a locked door can do.
The door was not Hollywood. It was Atlanta theater, then New York: the Black Image Theatre, the Negro Ensemble Company, August Wilson when Wilson still needed actors who could carry a whole kitchen. He married the actress LaTanya Richardson in 1980. They had a daughter, Zoe. He worked. He also used. Cocaine, then crack. The marriage held in the way marriages hold when one person is disappearing in plain sight. He has said the drugs were not a lifestyle. They were a mask.
I was a person who used drugs and alcohol to mask a lot of things that were going on inside of me.Samuel L. Jackson
In 1990 he went to rehab. While he was there, Spike Lee called. The part was Gator Purify in Jungle Fever (1991), a crack addict, a brother the picture cannot save. Jackson was newly clean. He played the thing he had just stopped being. Cannes invented a supporting prize so it could give him one. That is the first public monument. It is also the last time the town was allowed to file him only as a problem.
He had already been in Lee’s pictures — School Daze, Do the Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues — and in bits the public did not yet attach to a name: a hold-up man in Goodfellas, a scientist who does not survive Jurassic Park, a big scene in True Romance. Quentin Tarantino, who had seen the bits, wrote Jules Winnfield with Jackson’s cadence in his ear. Pulp Fiction made the cadence civic. The Ezekiel speech, the burger, the miracle in the car, the wallet that says Bad Mother- and then the rest of the word. The Academy nominated him for Best Supporting Actor. He did not win. He became, at forty-five, a movie star of a kind the town had not budgeted for: older, exact, funny without begging, dangerous without a gymnast’s body.
What came next was not a lucky streak. It was volume with a standard. Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995) put him opposite Bruce Willis as a Harlem shopkeeper drafted into a bomb plot; the picture is a duet. A Time to Kill (1996) gave him a summation that still plays in clip shows. The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996). Eve’s Bayou (1997), which he also produced. Then Tarantino again: Jackie Brown (1997), as Ordell Robbie, an arms dealer who talks people into their own graves. It is, for a lot of actors, the better performance. The public kept Jules. Jackson kept working.
George Lucas asked him to be a Jedi. Mace Windu, in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999) and the two pictures that followed, is a bald authority in a brown robe. Jackson asked for a purple lightsaber so he could find himself in the wide shots. The request is a professional’s joke and a merchandising fact. John Singleton’s Shaft (2000) put him in leather as a nephew of the old Richard Roundtree weather. M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable (2000) made him a collector of comic-book faith. He was, by the turn of the century, a man you hired when you needed the picture to have a spine.
Nick Fury walked into the Marvel machine in a post-credits sting at the end of Iron Man (2008). The eyepatch was already a comic-book object. Jackson made it a management style. Through The Avengers (2012) and the decade of pictures that treated the universe as a corporate plan, he was the man who told gods and billionaires to sit down. He has said he wanted the color of the saber to match a favorite; he has treated Fury with the same practical vanity. The box-office ledgers that list him among the highest-grossing actors alive are not a personality. They are a count of Fridays. He showed up for the Fridays. He also showed up for Django Unchained (2012), as Stephen, a house slave who is the picture’s most precise cruelty, and for The Hateful Eight (2015). Tarantino kept calling. Jackson kept answering in a different key.
That is the turn, and it is easy to miss because the lightsaber and the patch are so loud. The turn is 1990–91: rehab, then Gator, then a career that does not exist without the first clean morning. Every Jules line, every Fury briefing, every purple blade is work done sober. He has not made a sermon of it every time a reporter asks. He has not hidden it either. LaTanya stayed. Zoe grew up in a house that had already survived the years the public never saw.
Six things most people never knew
- Chattanooga is the raising; Washington is only the birth certificate. A grandmother’s house. A Southern clock. The voice the diners quote was built in Tennessee.
- The 1969 Morehouse lock-in is in the file. A theater student, a board of trustees, Martin Luther King Sr. in the room. He learned the locked door before he learned the mark.
- The famous catalog starts after rehab. 1990. Spike called while he was still in treatment. Jungle Fever is the first picture he made clean. Jules is three years after that.
- Cannes invented a prize so it could hand him one. Gator, 1991. The town had not yet budgeted a category. The performance required one.
- The purple lightsaber is a request, not a prophecy. He asked Lucas so he could find himself in the wide shot. A generation of children thinks the Jedi came that way from the toy factory.
- LaTanya Richardson married him in 1980, before the fame and during the use. Zoe is their daughter. The marriage is the long occupation under the franchises.
Between Jules and Fury the shop never closed. Fresh (1994) put him in a chess-and-corner picture that still plays in film schools. Losing Isaiah (1995). The Great White Hype (1996). 187 (1997), as a teacher in a school the city had already given up on. The Negotiator (1998) opposite Kevin Spacey. Deep Blue Sea (1999), a shark picture in which he dies early and the audience still talks about the speech. He produced when the producing helped a picture he wanted made. He took the paycheck pictures and the prestige pictures in the same season and did not ask the town to sort them for him. Changing Lanes (2002). XXX (2002). S.W.A.T. (2003). Coach Carter (2005) made him a high-school basketball coach who benches a winning team over grades; the picture is a sermon that works because he plays the rule, not the halo. Snakes on a Plane (2006) is a title he turned into a dare and a civic joke. He said the title out loud. The country repeated it. That, too, is a kind of starring.
He has described himself, in one version or another, as a character actor who got leading-man traffic. The description is accurate. Lakeview Terrace (2008), the Kingsman pictures, Kong: Skull Island (2017), the Star Wars returns, the Marvel returns. He does not protect the voice by using it less. He protects it by using it on purpose. Friends from the New York years describe a man who still talks about rehearsal as if it were oxygen. The Hollywood years did not cure that. They hired it.
The later years
The years after Fury became a fixture have been a working life at a volume most statues never attempt. He did not retire into the patch. He took the patch on the road and then took other faces between the press tours. In 2022 the Academy gave him an Honorary Award, the kind of statue the town hands a man whose competitive nominations never caught the size of the ledger. He accepted it as a worker accepts a watch: pleased, not finished. He was seventy-three. He was still the person a franchise called when the briefing scene needed to land.
Home has been, for decades, a marriage that predates Jules. LaTanya Richardson Jackson is an actress with her own notices; they have appeared together and kept the house from becoming a joint press kit. Zoe has had to share a father with two galaxies and a diner speech. He plays golf the way some men keep a second religion. He keeps the Super Fly sense of clothes. He keeps saying yes to directors who want the voice for one scene that will be the scene people remember. That is a star’s generosity and a craftsman’s hustle. Both are in the file.
He has used the fame the way a man who remembers 1990 uses a second chance: loudly, often, and without much apology for the volume. He has spoken for civil-rights memory and for the simple arithmetic of showing up on time. He has taken comic-book money and put some of it into pictures that will never open on three thousand screens. He has not become a director of his own monument. He has become a company that happens to be one man. The 2020s still have him in the Marvel machinery — Captain Marvel, Spider-Man: Far From Home, Secret Invasion, the odd briefing that still needs the patch — and in smaller rooms that want an actor, not a logo. Shyamalan brought him back as Elijah Price in Glass (2019). Tarantino’s company, even when Tarantino is between pictures, still has his number. He is in his seventies. He is still, by the ledger, one of the most seen faces on earth.
The Honorary Oscar night in 2022 was a civic thank-you for a filmography the competitive ballots had only sampled. He did not treat it as a closing argument. He treated it as a Friday. The next Monday there was still a call sheet. Golf remained the other religion. Fashion remained a second language — the Super Fly coats, the hats, the refusal to dress like a man who has agreed to be retired. He has done voice work for animation and for advertising that keeps the cadence in the culture between pictures. He has shown up for Morehouse and for Chattanooga when those rooms asked. He has not written a soft memoir of the rehab years. He has said the sentence when the sentence was owed and then gone back to hitting the mark. That is the second half as he has actually lived it: not a sunset, a continuing call time.
The spotlight did not move so much as multiply. Children who never saw Jungle Fever know Fury. People who never saw Fury know the diner. People who only know the diner have missed the decade in New York when the name was a credit in small type. He has not asked the public to study the small type. He has also never pretended the small type was not the education.
After the spotlight moved
It has not moved. The diner speech still walks into a room and sits down. The purple blade still walks into a toy aisle. The eyepatch still walks into a Marvel Friday. Younger actors who get famous after forty are in his house whether they send a note or not. The Honorary Oscar is in a case. The marriage is in the house. The clean date is in the body.
He came out of Chattanooga, locked a door at Morehouse, learned the stage, lost years to a pipe, got sober, played the thing he had been, quoted Scripture as Jules, ran a Jedi council, held a universe together with a patch, took an honorary statue at seventy-three, and kept working. If you only remember Ezekiel in the diner, you have the still. If you remember the grandmother’s house, the rehab call, Gator, and LaTanya in 1980, you have him.
Portrait: Dick Thomas Johnson · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons