PRIDE OF PLACE

By CHRISTOPHER J. FARLEY/TORONTO

Not one [black American actor] has ever been seriously challenged to deliver the best that is in him. --James Baldwin The Devil Finds Work, 1975

Throughout the history of American cinema, people who appear in movies seem to have been divided into two categories: actors and black actors. Actors--tacitly understood to mean white actors--played every sort of role in every kind of film, from action heroes to sex sirens, in horror films and period pieces. Black actors, on the other hand, were defined by their race and carefully circumscribed in the parts they could play--usually sidekicks, servants or criminals. Even the few black actors who broke into leading-man roles were confined in various ways. Sidney Poitier, the premier black star of the 1950s and '60s, was all too often limited to moralizing integrationist films. Eddie Murphy, one of the biggest box-office draws of the '80s, has found it difficult to move beyond formulaic comedies.

But Denzel Washington stands apart. At 40, he is one of Hollywood's highest-paid stars, earning $10 million for his next film, the military drama Courage Under Fire, co-starring Meg Ryan. He has been nominated for three Academy Awards, winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in the 1989 Civil War epic Glory. More important than achieving these milestones, however, has been to playing a variety of challenging and not race-specific roles. For every Malcolm X, in which he starred as the slain Muslim leader, there was a Philadelphia, in which he played a homophobic lawyer who just happened to be black. He has shown a facility for Shakespearean comedy (Much Ado About Nothing), as well as for Spike Lee drama (Mo' Better Blues). In just the past four months Washington has had starring roles in three very different films: the submarine drama Crimson Tide, the high-tech thriller Virtuosity and the murder-mystery Devil in a Blue Dress, which opens this week.

Other black actors--Wesley Snipes, Samuel L. Jackson, Laurence Fishburne--have drawn deserved critical acclaim, but none has achieved Washington's mix of box-office clout and acting craft. He is a black actor--proudly, fiercely so--who has succeeded in making that term merely descriptive, not professionally limiting. Few other actors of any color could sincerely say, as Washington does about fellow superstars Kevin Costner and Tom Cruise, "They haven't made any movies that I wanted to make. I haven't felt like I've missed anything." Yet he sees himself not as a standard-bearer but simply as an actor trying to make smart choices and do good work. "I don't do films based on what I think people need," he says. "And I don't consider myself a role model."

Washington doesn't consider himself a sex symbol either, though on that point many moviegoers would disagree. Director Spike Lee recalls going to see Mo' Better Blues in a theater and, when Washington's character was being beaten up hearing women scream, "Not the face!" Yet filmgoers and critics have noticed that this romantic leading man has had notably few romantic attachments on-screen--particularly with white leading ladies. In The Pelican Brief, for instance, Washington shares top billing with Julia Roberts but never has an affair with her onscreen (though the two characters get together in the John Grisham novel on which the film is based). Similarly, in Devil, a romance involving Washington's character that was in Walter Mosley's novel is absent from the film (Washington says it was removed for dramatic flow).

In an interview with TIME last week in Toronto, where he was attending a film festival, Washington was diplomatically evasive on the subject: "Is [romance] being kept from me? I don't know. I can say that a love story within a film has never been a reason for my doing or not doing a film. In The Pelican Brief, in the script that I read, it wasn't there, and I also felt that since [the boyfriend of Roberts' character] had died three days ago, it didn't seem right to me that...she falls in love with another guy." Roberts, asked about their screen relationship, giggles and replies: "I wouldn't have minded if he kissed her...but Denzel has a valid point, and I respected that."

Respect is something Washington has always commanded. He grew up in Mount Vernon, New York, the son of a beautician mother and a minister father. His father, who died during rehearsals of Malcolm X, provided an inspiration for that role, and Washington remains religious, saying that he has an ongoing "conversation" with God. A few weeks ago, he quietly agreed to donate $2.5 million to the building fund of the West Angeles Church of God in Christ, where he, his wife of 12 years, Pauletta Pearson and his four children attend services.

Washington went to New York's Fordham University, where he was known as both a brilliant actor and a mercurial student. "I had to tell him to get his ass in class 'cause he was cutting so much," says Robinson Stone, a former professor. "[But] when I saw him in The Emperor Jones, he was the best actor I had seen onstage." After graduation, Washington studied with the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and later appeared in numerous New York stage productions, including the acclaimed 1981 Negro Ensemble Theater production of A Soldier's Play. "Show business has a tendency to spin people around and make them so dizzy they forget where they came from and where they're going," says Julia Roberts, a woman who knows a thing or two about Hollywood vertigo. "Denzel is very grounded in who he is and what he's doing and why he's doing it."

Yet he can be an inscrutable star, friendly and freewheeling when he chats about, say, a favorite restaurant (Jezebel's, a New York City soul-food place), but guarded when queries are made about his personal life and professional motives. Talking about himself, he gives a well-calibrated performance--though he's too good an actor for anyone to determine which of his moods are felt and which are feigned. When difficult questions are posed, he grows monosyllabic, evasive. Asked about a confrontation he reportedly had with director Quentin Tarantino over the repeated use of the N- word in Pulp Fiction, he pirouettes around the issue: "I did have problems with [Pulp Fiction]. I like the movie, I think he's very talented, and I expressed to him the problems I had with it. But I won't talk about it because I didn't talk about it to him in order for other people to hear about it."

Washington is more candid on other topics. He ridicules Senator Bob Dole's suggestion that there's too much sex and violence in movies: "I've looked at C-SPAN and said the same thing." Although he loved the movies Menace II Society and Boyz N the Hood, he feels the gangsta film genre may be exhausted: "I don't pay to see 'life in the hood' movies anymore. That story's been told. If someone has something to spill from their heart, God bless 'em, they should...but if someone's just saying, 'Oh I'm gonna keep doing this 'cause it makes money,' I'll be the first person in line to punch that person in the head."

Washington's varied roles will keep coming: soon he will co-star with Whitney Houston in a remake of the 1947 Cary Grant comedy The Bishop's Wife. "I bring myself to any part," he says. "And I'll bring my experiences and voice my opinions." Those opinions are often present beneath the surface; in his performances, there is a smoldering Afrocentricity that gives his work depth, connecting it to a cultural reality larger than the movies in which he appears. In one scene in The Pelican Brief, he kicks at a cab that has passed him by. In Devil in a Blue Dress, his character takes pointed pride in being one of the few blacks in his neighborhood to own his own home. Says Carl Franklin, who directed Devil: "Denzel is blessed. He has 'it.'" Other black actors had it but never got the chance. Washington, at last, is getting to use it.

--With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles