In the present genre of actors Denzel Washington happens to be an exception being a two time Academy Award and Golden Globe Award winning American actor and director. It is to be noted, that he has been much acclaimed for his notable performances in the portrayals of several real-life figures, for instance, Steve Biko, Malcolm X, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter and Herman Boone. From his childhood though he was a part of a happy family, but at the fourteenth year of his life, his parents' marriage took a worse turn. He along with his older sister and younger brother was sent to a boarding school, so that they shouldn't have any such conception of the divorce of their parents. He attended a Grammar School at Pennington Grimes Elementary School in Mount Vernon. From school Denzel Washington went to the college to be a part of the discipline of B.A. in Drama and Journalism, from the Fordham University in 1977. After graduation he went to San Francisco, where he won a scholarship to the American Conservatory Theatre. It was at this time when he began seriously acting in various television movies and made his film debut in the 1981 film Carbon Copy. However his role was not acclaimed and he had to wait for the first critical acclamation to the long-running TV series St. Elsewhere in 1982. In the role of Dr. Phillip Chandler he earned the attention of the public and started getting Hollywood notice. Denzel Washington happened to be one of the very few actors to appear on the series for its six-year run. The year 1987 happened to be a milestone in his trivial career, for in that year he starred in Cry Freedom of Richard Attenborough, as a South African anti-apartheid campaigner Steve Biko, for which he received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. But in the year 1989 Denzel Washington indeed won an Oscar in the category of Best Supporting Actor for playing a defiant, self-possessed ex-slave in the film, Glory. The same year also perceived another graceful performance from him. His starred in the role of Reuben James, a Caribbean-born who through the course of his life turned from a paratrooper of the British Army to a vigilance man, in For Queen and Country. However, from the commencement the decade of 1990's happened to be a different one. In 1992 he played one of his most critically acclaimed roles in the film, Malcolm X, directed by Spike Lee. It was his performance in the role of a struggling Black Nationalist Leader that earned him an Oscar nomination. In the view of well-known film critics, Roger Ebert and Martin Scorsese, the movie was one of the ten best films made during the 1990s. If there is any film in the career of Denzel Washington that made his identity, it is nothing except Malcolm X, which made him the most respected star of Hollywood. In the year 1999, Washington starred in The Hurricane, a movie on boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, the person whose conviction for triple murder was overturned after he had spent almost 20 years in prison.
In the 2000s, to begin with Washington acted in a film of the Disney's, Remember the Titans, which had a box office success of over $ 100 million in the whole of the United States of America. For the cop thriller Training Day, in 2001 Denzel Washington was nominated and bagged the accolade for Best Actor. He made a rare stage appearance in 2005 in William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, in the role of Brutus, at the Broadway. On May 20,2007 Washington received an honorary doctorate of humanities degree from the Morehouse College.