Samuel L. Jackson

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Samuel Leroy Jackson was born on the 21st of December, 1948, in Washington, D.C., the only child of Elizabeth Harriett and Roy Henry Jackson. His father lived away in Kansas City, Missouri, and died of alcoholism. Jackson met him only twice in his life. He was raised by his mother, a factory worker who later became a supplies buyer for a psychiatric hospital, alongside his maternal grandparents Edgar and Pearl Montgomery.

  As a boy in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Jackson developed a stutter. He learned to cope by pretending to be other people who did not stutter. That habit of inhabiting other people would prove to be the most consequential skill he ever developed. By 2022, the films he appeared in had grossed more than $27 billion worldwide, making him the highest-grossing actor of all time. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences called him "a cultural icon whose dynamic work has resonated across genres and generations and audiences worldwide."

  How does a boy who stuttered in segregated Chattanooga become the most commercially successful actor in cinema history? The answer runs through a hostage-taking on a college campus, a stint as an overnight security guard in Manhattan, a near-fatal addiction, and a single role that changed everything.

• 2. Segregation, Rebellion, and Morehouse

  ›

  Jackson attended several segregated schools in Chattanooga before graduating from Riverside High School, where he played the French horn, piccolo, trumpet, and flute in the school orchestra. He enrolled at Morehouse College in Atlanta intending to study marine biology, and worked as a cheerleader there. The path toward drama opened almost by accident: he joined a local acting group to earn extra credit in a class, found he was drawn to the stage, and switched his major.

  Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968 shook him. Jackson attended King's funeral in Atlanta as an usher, then traveled to Memphis to join an equal rights protest march. He later told Parade in 2005: "I was angry about the assassination, but I wasn't shocked by it. I knew that change was going to take something different, not sit-ins, not peaceful coexistence."

  In 1969, that fury became action. Jackson and several other Morehouse students seized members of the college's Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr., and held them on campus to demand reform in the curriculum and governance. The college eventually agreed to change its policy. Jackson was convicted of unlawful confinement, a second-degree felony, and suspended for two years. During his suspension he worked as a social worker in Los Angeles, then returned to Atlanta, where he met Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and others in the Black Power movement. His mother intervened after the FBI warned her he would die within a year. She sent him back to Los Angeles. He returned to Morehouse and earned his BA in drama in 1972.

  A DNA test later revealed he partially descends from the Benga people of Gabon, and he became a naturalized citizen of Gabon in 2019. On a 2012 episode of Finding Your Roots, he also learned that Judge Joel Branham, a white slaveholder of English ancestry in Georgia, was his third great-grandfather.

• 3. New York, Addiction, and the Stage

  ›

  Jackson moved from Atlanta to New York City in 1976 and spent the next decade on the stage. He originated the role of Private Louis Henderson in Charles Fuller's A Soldier's Play off-Broadway between 1981 and 1983. He also originated the role of Boy Willie in August Wilson's The Piano Lesson in 1987 at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Both plays would eventually move to Broadway, but not with him.

  To pay rent, he worked overnight shifts as a security guard at the Manhattan Plaza apartment complex while auditioning during the day. He developed addictions to alcohol and cocaine severe enough that actors Charles S. Dutton and Anthony Chisholm replaced him when the two plays transferred to Broadway. He made his professional theater debut at The Public Theater in New York City in Mother Courage and Her Children in 1980. His feature film debut had come earlier in the blaxploitation independent film Together for Days in 1972.

  His introduction to Spike Lee came after a 1981 performance in A Soldier's Play. Lee cast him in small roles in School Daze in 1988 and Do the Right Thing in 1989. During those years Jackson also worked for three years as a stand-in for Bill Cosby on The Cosby Show and was mentored by Morgan Freeman. He had overdosed on heroin several times before switching to cocaine. After his family entered him into a New York rehabilitation clinic, he emerged clean and almost immediately stepped in front of Lee's camera for Jungle Fever.

• 4. Cannes, Rehab, and the Spike Lee Years

  ›

  Jackson's performance in Jungle Fever as a crack cocaine addict was the role that cracked him open professionally. He later described the timing as cathartic, saying that barely a week after leaving rehab he was on set and ready to start shooting. The jury at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival created a special Supporting Actor award specifically for him. No such category existed in Cannes' official competition, but the jury added it because his work demanded recognition.

  His character in Goodfellas the previous year, 1990, had been a real-life Mafia associate named Stacks Edwards, a minor role in a Martin Scorsese film that showed Jackson's range without yet proving his draw. After Jungle Fever, he moved through the comedy Strictly Business and the dramas Juice and Patriot Games. National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 gave him his first starring role.

  In 1993, Steven Spielberg cast him in Jurassic Park. That same year he appeared in Menace II Society, Fresh, and True Romance, where he played the criminal Big Don in a Quentin Tarantino script directed by Tony Scott. That performance would set something larger in motion.

• 5. Jules Winnfield and the Breakthrough

  ›

  Pulp Fiction in 1994 was Jackson's thirtieth film, and it was the one that remade his career. Tarantino had written the role of Jules Winnfield specifically for him. Jackson later recalled: "To know that somebody had written something like Jules for me. I was overwhelmed, thankful, arrogant, this whole combination of things that you could be, knowing that somebody's going to give you an opportunity like that."

  Entertainment Weekly wrote at the time: "As superb as Travolta, Willis, and Keitel are, the actor who reigns over Pulp Fiction is Samuel L. Jackson. He just about lights fires with his gremlin eyes and he transforms his speeches into hypnotic bebop soliloquies." Miramax Films pushed for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination and he received it. He also won the BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Role and earned a Golden Globe nomination.

  The wave of scripts that followed carried a warning embedded in them. Jackson observed that everyone was sending him what they called the new Pulp Fiction. A string of films including Kiss of Death, The Great White Hype, and Losing Isaiah underperformed and drew criticism. The run broke with Die Hard with a Vengeance alongside Bruce Willis and A Time to Kill, in which he played a father put on trial for killing two men who raped his daughter. For A Time to Kill he won the NAACP Image Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture and received a fourth Golden Globe nomination.

  Tarantino came back with Jackie Brown in 1997, and Jackson's portrayal of arms merchant Ordell Robbie won him the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the 48th Berlin International Film Festival.

• 6. Nick Fury, Mace Windu, and the Franchise Era

  ›

  Jackson's entry into the Star Wars universe had an unusual prelude. He told interviewers that he did not have a chance to read the script for Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace in 1999, and did not learn he was playing Mace Windu until he was fitted for his costume. He had simply wanted any part in the saga. The purple lightsaber Mace Windu carried in Episode II, Attack of the Clones, was Jackson's own suggestion. He wanted his character to stand out in a crowded battle scene.

  The Nick Fury relationship began even more obliquely. In 2002, Marvel Comics designed their Ultimate version of the character after Jackson's likeness without his knowledge or consent. Jackson, an active comic book reader, recognized his own face in the panels and had his agents contact Marvel. The publisher pledged to cast him in future film adaptations. The first appearance came in a post-credit cameo in Iron Man in 2008. In February 2009, he signed a nine-picture deal with Marvel Studios that would carry him through Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, The Avengers, and subsequent films. By the time of Captain Marvel in 2019, visual effects allowed a de-aged Jackson to play a younger Fury opposite Brie Larson.

  On the 13th of June, 2000, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7018 Hollywood Blvd. On the 30th of January, 2006, he became the seventh African American and 191st actor honored with a hand and footprint ceremony at Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

• 7. Voice, Golf, and the Personal Life

  ›

  Jackson married actress LaTanya Richardson in 1980, the woman he met while attending Morehouse College. They have a daughter, Zoe, born in 1982. In 2009 the couple started a charity to support education. LaTanya Richardson Jackson directed the 2022 Broadway revival of The Piano Lesson, in which her husband starred as Doaker Charles, a role that earned him a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play nomination, more than three decades after he had originated Boy Willie in the same play.

  His voice has carried enormous commercial range. He voiced Frank Tenpenny in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in 2004 and Frozone in The Incredibles that same year, earning an Annie Award nomination for Best Voice Acting. In November 2006, he provided the voice of God for The Bible Experience, the New Testament audiobook. He also recorded the Audible audiobook of Go the Fuck to Sleep.

  Jackson has explained that his use of the word motherfucker serves a practical purpose: it helps him push through the speech blocks caused by his stutter, which still troubles him on some days. He built a fundraising campaign called Motherfunder around the word's connection to his reputation.

  He is an avid golfer and has a clause in his contracts that allows him to play golf during film shoots. He has participated in the Gary Player Invitational charity golf tournament to help raise funds for children in South Africa. He became a supporter of English football club Liverpool FC after filming The 51st State in Liverpool in 2001. He also holds Gabonese citizenship, granted in 2019 after DNA results linked him to the Benga ethnic group.

  In 2025 it was announced that Jackson would star in NOLA King, a Tulsa King spin-off set in New Orleans, before the project was retitled Frisco King and relocated to Frisco, Texas, with an announcement on the 24th of February, 2026.