A camp talent show turned Denzel Washington from undecided student into actor
Denzel Washington drifted through Fordham unsure what to study, even taking a semester off. Working at a YMCA summer camp in Connecticut, he joined a staff talent show, and a colleague told him to try acting. He went back that autumn to study drama, and The New York Times later called him the century's greatest actor.
Washington was born on December 28, 1954, in Mount Vernon, just outside New York City. His mother ran a beauty parlour; his father was a Pentecostal minister who also worked for the city water department. When his parents divorced, the 14-year-old was sent to Oakland Military Academy in New Windsor. He later credited that move with saving him, saying the friends he had been running with went on to serve roughly 40 years in prison between them.
At Fordham he played basketball as a guard under P. J. Carlesimo and took a degree in drama and journalism in 1977. Back on campus after the camp summer, he was cast as Othello and as the lead in The Emperor Jones, then spent a year at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. His screen debut was a 1977 television docudrama about the sprinter Wilma Rudolph. The real turning point was six seasons as Dr. Phillip Chandler on the NBC hospital series St. Elsewhere, from 1982 to 1988; he was one of very few Black actors to stay with the show throughout.
The awards came steadily. Playing Stephen Biko in Cry Freedom in 1987 earned his first Oscar nomination, and two years later he won Best Supporting Actor for Glory, as a formerly enslaved Union soldier. His title role in Spike Lee's Malcolm X in 1992 brought his first nomination as a leading man, and he finally won Best Actor for Training Day in 2001, playing a crooked police officer. He also took a Silver Bear in Berlin for playing the boxer Rubin Carter in The Hurricane.
He has never left the stage. He made his Broadway debut in 1988 and won a Tony in 2010 for August Wilson's Fences, which he later directed as a film. Among his honours are the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2016, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2019, and both an Honorary Palme d'Or and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2025. His films have grossed more than 5.1 billion dollars worldwide.
Source: Denzel Washington
