Samuel Jackson, who has appeared in more than 60 films as well as many plays, was a supporting actor who became a major film star. Born in Washington, D.C., he attended Morehouse College in Atlanta, majoring in theater arts. While at Morehouse he was politically active and was briefly suspended in 1969 for taking some of the college's trustees hostage in a protest over the college's lack of a black studies curriculum.
At Morehouse, he met LaTanya Richardson, a Spelman College undergraduate and actress whom he later married. After graduation, he did commercials for local television, appeared in regional theatrical productions, and made his screen debut in Together for Days (1973). After he moved to New York City in 1976, he appeared in productions of the Negro Ensemble Company, where he was introduced to director SPIKE LEE, who had also attended Morehouse. Lee cast Samuel Jackson in four of his films, the last of which, Jungle Fever (1991), brought him critical acclaim. He was given a special jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival and received the New York Film Critics Circle Award as Best Supporting Actor.
During the 1980s, he had a walk-on role in Milos Forman's Ragtime (1981), appeared on Broadway in two August Wilson plays, The Piano Lesson and Two Trains Running, and had small roles in Coming to America (1988) and Sea of Love (1989). After Jungle Fever, however, he played more and bigger roles. Some of his big films were Patriot Games (1992) and Jurassic Park (1993). In 1994 his career received another boost when he played hit man Jules in Pulp Fiction; for his performance he received an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor.
During the 1990s, he appeared in racially charged films such as A Time to Kill (1996), in which he is on trial for the murder of the men who raped his daughter; he won the NAACP Image Award as Best Supporting Actor for his role. He also starred in a made-for-television movie, West Point: The Court-Martial of Johnson Whittaker (1994) about the brutalization and subsequent cover-up involving an African-American cadet.
In a buddy picture, he was BRUCE WILLIS's partner in Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995), but his best roles were as a womanizing physician in Eve's Bayou (1997) and as the ruthless drug dealer in Jackie Brown (1997), QUENTIN TARANTINO's homage to the blaxploitation films he admired.
In 1999, Samuel Jackson also took on the role of Jedi knight Mace Windu in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) and Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002). The same year, Samuel Jackson appeared in the killer-shark action flick Deep Blue Sea. In 2000, he recreated the role of Ernest Tidyman's private eye John Shaft in John Singleton's big-budget remake of Shaft.
Despite a powerful performance from Samuel Jackson, the movie was only a moderate success. Other films starring Samuel Jackson included Unbreakable (2000), Changing Lanes (2002), XXX (2002), Basic (2003), and S.W.A.T (2003). More recently, he has entered the production end of the business with Caveman's Valentine and Mefisto in Onyx (both 2001).
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