Denzel Washington

Denzel Washington spent six years as Dr Philip Chandler on St. Elsewhere, from 1982 to 1988, which is a long apprenticeship for an actor who would end up where he did. A Soldier's Story in 1984 got him onto film. Cry Freedom in 1987 brought a first Academy Award nomination, Best Supporting Actor, for playing Steve Biko. Two years later Glory put him in the same category and he won it, at the ceremony held in 1990. He had been on television the whole time, and then he was not.

Malcolm X arrived in 1992 and remains the performance his admirers argue about most. It took the Silver Bear at Berlin and a Best Actor nomination, and lost the Oscar. What surrounded it was a decade of steady, unshowy work - Mississippi Masala, Philadelphia, The Pelican Brief, Crimson Tide - in which he was rarely the subject of the film and almost always the reason to watch it. The Hurricane in 1999 brought a second Silver Bear, the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a drama, and a third nomination.

Training Day closed the argument. Alonzo Harris is a Los Angeles narcotics detective running a private economy out of a police car, and the part required Washington to be charming and entirely without conscience at once. At the ceremony on 24 March 2002 he took Best Actor, the second Black man to win the category after Sidney Poitier, who collected an honorary award the same evening. Halle Berry won Best Actress. It was a very particular night, and it had taken thirty-eight years to arrive.

The then-and-now comparison does not work on Washington in the usual way, because there is no decline to measure it against. He won a Tony in 2010 for Fences and directed the film version in 2016, took the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2019, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in January 2025 and an honorary Palme d'Or at Cannes four months after that. Nine acting nominations across five decades. The photographs from 1989 and the photographs from now show a man doing the same job at the same level.