Denzel Duo Denzel Washington Is Said To Be Two People On A Film - Intensely Focused At Work, Easygoing And Playful When Off Duty

Wearing a faded baseball cap and scuffed sneakers, Denzel Washington fits right in with the crowd of wannabe Michael Jordans milling around the hard asphalt at the Venice Beach basketball courts. In fact, he’s such a regular guy - or at least acts like such a regular guy - that he goes unnoticed as he stands at the edge of the courts, his watchful eyes hidden behind a pair of sunglasses.

“I used to love to play,” he says, watching a bare-chested young hotshot strut downcourt after his 20-foot jumper swishes through the net. “But my knees.” He winces. “It was so easy to run up and down, all day long. But no more. My playground days are long gone.”

As an actor, Washington has always made it look easy, displaying the same effortless grace as his childhood hero, Hall of Fame running back Gale Sayers. At 41, Washington is a Hollywood prince, the industry’s only A-list African-American movie star. Nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar for “Cry Freedom,” winner of one for “Glory” and nominated for a best actor Oscar for “Malcolm X,” he has shared the screen with the top actors of his era, from Tom Hanks in “Philadelphia” and Julia Roberts in “The Pelican Brief” to Gene Hackman in “Crimson Tide,” while using his star clout to get financing for movies such as “Devil in a Blue Dress” and Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X.”

Sitting for an interview just an hour after his first viewing of his new film, “Courage Under Fire,” Washington is friendly but guarded, hiding his feelings much as his baggy Speedo sweatsuit conceals his sinewy 6-foot frame. His admirers tell you to watch his most expressive feature - his eyes. But even when he tucks away his sunglasses, letting you see his soft, chocolate-hued eyes, he is not an easy man to read. As with many of the characters he plays on screen, his relaxed demeanor masks a complex jumble of emotions.

Whether the topic is racism in Hollywood or his reluctance to play love scenes on screen, Washington doesn’t so much dodge a question as wrestle with it - he won’t be pinned down to a glib, predictable answer. It’s a quality you see in his acting - he’s elusive.

Washington hates his image as a “private” guy. “Where does that come from?” he wonders. “I read that in so many stories. I’m this deep, dark, private guy. Is it just one story and then everyone picks up on it and uses it?

“I’m just a regular guy. I don’t take myself seriously. I take my work seriously. But there’s always this other stuff that gets mixed up with it.”

It’s hard to get away from that other stuff. To be a black celebrity in a white world is to live a life beset by contradiction. Washington lives in a house once owned by William Holden and has dinner with Michael Jordan after Bulls playoff games, and when he and his wife, Pauletta, visited South Africa last year, they renewed their marriage vows in a ceremony conducted by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

But when he’s in New York City, heading uptown, he can’t always get a taxi to stop for him. He commands $10 million a movie yet maintains that Hollywood is pockmarked by racism, just like the rest of America. When he met Quentin Tarantino on the set of “Crimson Tide,” he gave the young director a verbal spanking for his repeated use of the N-word in “Pulp Fiction.”

Black celebrities are often held to a higher standard — anyone who is not a crusader must be a sellout. Washington quietly gave $2.5 million to his church in Los Angeles, but when he went back to his old playground in Mt. Vernon, N.Y., he was barraged with job requests and complaints that he was not doing enough for his community. He has the power to insist that his films hire a sizable percentage of black crew members, yet when it came time to choose a director for “The Preacher’s Wife,” a black-cast remake of a Cary Grant comedy called “The Bishop’s Wife,” he picked Penny Marshall.

“It wasn’t that I didn’t think of a black person,” he responds, his eyes glinting with a hint of annoyance. “I just saw Penny as the right person for the movie. On ‘Devil in a Blue Dress,’ I knew it had to be a black filmmaker - that’s why we went with Carl Franklin.”

Washington says he fully supported the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Academy Awards protest. Even if the timing “could’ve been better,” it was important to open a debate on the issue. But he realizes that race is just one factor in studio decision making. In fact, when asked about the budget dispute that sank a film biography he and Spike Lee had planned to make about Jackie Robinson this year, Washington acknowledges that he had not wanted to play the role anyway.

“I couldn’t get behind it,” he says of the story about Robinson, who broke baseball’s color line in 1947. “It was a good script, but I’d already been down that road with ‘Malcolm X’ and I just couldn’t see myself as Jackie Robinson.”

He smiles. “Plus, I’m too old to slide.”

For Washington, ignoring race would be like ignoring the existence of gravity. “It’s a racist society,” he says. “Everything in this country is about color, from the Los Angeles Times to Sony Studios to General Electric to the 30-some-odd black churches that have been burned down in the past 18 months.

“And if it’s not a level playing field in America, it’s certainly not in Hollywood. I’m in an all-white world in both places.”

But in personal terms, has being black hurt Washington’s career? He flashes a 1,000-watt smile and says, “Does it look like it?”

Washington’s talent and hard work have brought him far. Edward Zwick, who directed Washington in “Courage Under Fire” as well as in the earlier “Glory,” describes him as an actor who trusts his instincts. At the end of “Courage,” there is an emotional scene in which Washington’s character, a beleaguered Army colonel named Nathaniel Serling, returns to his wife and family after a long absence. Bags under his arm, he walks up to the front door, past a toddler’s bicycle parked by the front steps. Before shooting the scene, Zwick slid the bike to the ground to give the sequence a homier feel.

When the camera rolled, Washington strode up to the steps, then reached out and righted the bicycle before going inside. “We’d never spoken about it,” Zwick recalls. “But it was the perfect, unspoken gesture, to say that his character has returned home and is ready to resume the responsibilities of being a father.”

People who have worked with Washington say he is two people on a film: intensely focused when at work, easygoing and playful when off duty. (On “Preacher’s Wife,” he teased Whitney Houston so much she called him “goof-daddy.”) But when he’s playing a scene, co-workers give him a wide berth.

What makes Washington’s performances so striking is that he does so much with so little. He’s like a jazz musician - what he doesn’t play is just as important as what he does.

“I remember early on one of my acting coaches telling us that if you had two guys threatening you, who are you going to really worry about - the guy shouting and cursing in your face or the quiet guy, who just looks you right in the eye?” Washington explains. “It probably had a big influence on me, because that’s the guy I identify with - the quiet guy who looks right at you.”

Throughout his career, Washington has played flawed, reluctant heroes, men who lose their way but recover in time to do the right thing. Early in his career, as Steven Biko in “Cry Freedom” (1987) and Trip in “Glory” (1989), his heroes bristled with anger. More recently, he has broadened his range of emotion, revealing buried layers of warmth and vulnerability, especially in his roles as Malcolm X, as a homophobic lawyer in “Philadelphia” and as private eye Easy Rawlins in “Devil in a Blue Dress.”

In “Courage Under Fire,” which opened last week, Washington plays a Gulf War tank commander who destroys an Iraqi tank, only to discover that he has killed his own men. Devastated, he is told to keep quiet about the incident until the Army completes an internal investigation. While awaiting its outcome, he is ordered to review the Medal of Honor candidacy of a helicopter pilot, played by Meg Ryan, who was killed in combat. Was she really a hero? The accounts of her surviving copter team don’t provide an easy answer, sending Washington on a search both for truth and a way to make peace with his conscience.

“The movie is really an examination of courage,” says screenwriter Patrick Sheane Duncan, a Vietnam veteran. Duncan sent the script to producer Joseph Singer, who gave it to Washington.

“He read it in 48 hours and said, ‘I want to do the movie,’ ” Singer recalls. “What really impressed me was that Denzel wanted the movie to be great, not just his character. Every time he and Ed went over a new draft of the script, Denzel had constructive and generous suggestions. He was always open about giving up scenes - his scenes - to help the movie.”

To make his character as real as possible, Washington spent time with Army officers, observing war exercises, learning how to handle a gun and operate a tank.

“Once Denzel gets into character, it’s hard for him to shut down,” Singer says. “When he was out there in the desert in his tank, you really believed he was a leader of men in a real war. The Denzel Washington I knew was very far away.”