ver the past few years, recognition and appreciation for Laurence Fishburne's wide-ranging work has been extensive and impressive. In 1992, he was awarded a Tony for Best Featured Actor In A Play, a Drama Desk Award, an Outer Critic's Circle Award and a Theater World Award for his work on Broadway as Sterling Johnson in August Wilson's Two Trains Running. His rare television appearance in the 1993 premiere episode of Fox TV's Tribeca landed Laurence an Emmy. And to complete the triple crown, he was nominated for a 1993 Oscar as Best Actor for his portrayal of Ike Turner in the film What's Love Got To Do With It. In 2000 Laurence made his directorial debut, as well as starring in and producing Once in the Life, a film released by The Shooting Gallery. The screenplay, which he wrote, is based on his one-act play Riff Raff, in which he also starred, wrote and directed in 1994. The play received critical praise and was later brought to New York's Circle Rep Theater. The initial run in Los Angeles was the first production produced under his own banner, L.O.A. Productions.

In 1999 Laurence also starred with Keanu Reeves in the Warner Bros./Silver Pictures' box-office smash The Matrix, while also hitting the stage, appearing at the Roundabout Theater on Broadway, playing the lead role of Henry II, in The Lion in Winter, a revival of the 1966 hit that focuses on the struggle between Henry II of France and his estranged wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. In addition, Laurence starred in and executive produced HBO's Always Outnumbered, directed by Michael Apted from a first-time screenplay by author Walter Mosley.

In 1997, Laurence received an Emmy nomination (Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or Special) and an NAACP Image Award (1998) for his starring role in the HBO drama Miss Evers' Boys, which he also executive produced. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-nominated play about the true story of the Tuskegee Study, a controversial medical experiment (1932-72) in which the U.S. Government Public Health Service withheld treatment from a group of African-American men with syphilis, Miss Evers' Boys won five Emmys, including Outstanding Made for Television Movie and the coveted President's Award, which honors a program that illuminates a social or educational issue. Fishburne also starred in Paramount Pictures' Event Horizon, the science-fiction thriller directed by Paul Anderson and co-starring Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan and Joely Richardson; and Hoodlum, in which he starred and produced. In Hoodlum, directed by Bill Duke and co-starring Vanessa Williams, Tim Roth and Andy Garcia, he plays legendary racketeer Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson, the classy ex-con who defies infamous mobsters Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano to become king of Harlem's numbers runners during the violent Prohibition era of the 1930s.

In 1996, he starred in the MGM action-comedy Fled and starred in the critically-acclaimed Othello in the title role, co-starring with Kenneth Branagh and Irene Jacob for Castle Rock. He is the first African-American to play the Moor king in a major screen release and follows a noble tradition of such actors as Sir Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles in that role.