![]() After playing Robert McCall, a mysterious vigilante, in the action thriller The Equalizer (2014), Washington appeared in The Magnificent Seven (2016), a remake of the 1960 classic western. The action comedy 2 Guns, in which Washington was cast as a covert drug-enforcement operative, followed in 2013. He subsequently portrayed a rogue CIA agent in South Africa in the spy thriller Safe House (2012) before giving an Oscar-nominated performance in Flight (2012) as a heroic airplane pilot hiding a substance-abuse problem. In 2010 Washington starred in the postapocalyptic action drama The Book of Eli and collaborated again with Scott on the action thriller Unstoppable. He later appeared as a drug kingpin opposite Russell Crowe’s determined narcotics officer in American Gangster (2007) and as a dispatcher caught in the middle of a subway train hijacking in Scott’s The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009). After starring in director Jonathan Demme’s 2004 update of the 1962 thriller The Manchurian Candidate, Washington reteamed with Lee for the crime drama Inside Man (2006). In Training Day (2001), Washington played a corrupt and violent police detective, the performance for which he became only the second African American actor (the first was Sidney Poitier) to win an Oscar for best actor. Two years later he won the Oscar for best supporting actor for his performance as a freed slave fighting in the Union army in the American Civil War film Glory (1989).ĭenzel Washington and Christopher Plummer in Inside Man For the film Cry Freedom (1987), he portrayed South African activist Stephen Biko, and he received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor. He first began to receive national attention for his work on the television drama St. After several successful stage performances in California and New York, he made his screen debut in the comedy Carbon Copy (1981). Throughout his career he was regularly praised by critics, and his consistent success at the box office helped to dispel the perception that African American actors could not draw mainstream white audiences.Īfter graduating from Fordham University (B.A., 1977), Washington began to pursue acting as a career and joined the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.
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