The highest-grossing actor ever got his first big break in his thirtieth film
Films featuring Samuel L. Jackson have taken more than 27 billion dollars worldwide, more than any other actor's. Yet he spent years as a stand-in, a night security guard and a struggling addict before Quentin Tarantino wrote the role of Jules Winnfield specifically for him, in what turned out to be his thirtieth movie.
Jackson was born in Washington, D.C., in 1948 and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, by his mother and grandparents; he met his father only twice. As a child he stuttered and coped by pretending to be people who did not. He played four instruments in his school orchestra and went to Morehouse College in Atlanta meaning to study marine biology, but joining an acting group for extra class credit changed his course.
Politics nearly derailed him. After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Jackson served as an usher at the funeral. The following year he and other students locked Morehouse trustees, among them King's father, inside a building to demand reforms; the college conceded, but Jackson was convicted of unlawful confinement and suspended for two years. His mother later sent him to Los Angeles after the FBI warned her he would not survive a year with the militant circle he had joined. He returned to finish a drama degree in 1972.
In New York he worked stage productions, including premieres of August Wilson plays at Yale, while earning money as an overnight guard at an apartment complex and spending three years as Bill Cosby's stand-in. Addiction kept him from moving those plays to Broadway. After rehab he went almost straight onto the set of Spike Lee's Jungle Fever to play a crack addict, and the 1991 Cannes jury invented a special supporting actor prize just for him.
Pulp Fiction in 1994 earned him a BAFTA and an Oscar nomination. Later came a Silver Bear in Berlin for Jackie Brown, Mace Windu in the Star Wars prequels and Nick Fury across 11 Marvel films starting with Iron Man. DNA tests traced part of his ancestry to the Benga people of Gabon, which granted him citizenship in 2019, and in 2022 he received an honorary Academy Award.
Source: Samuel L. Jackson
