One Cool Cat
Written by Thomas Carney

On-screen, he's always copping roles as the character nobody dares mess with - Ike Turner, anyone? But as the writer, director, producer and (oh yeah) star of Once In The Life, based on his off-Broadway play, The Matrix's Laurence Fishburne is the ultimate smooth operator.

"I'm scared, I'm very nervous about this," says Laurence Fishburne, finishing up a chicken caesar on the patio of the Grand Havana Room, that sepulchral Beverly Hills boy's club devoted to the glories of the rolled tobacco leaf. The actor, who has just arrived from New Zealand and is rumbling around town on his custom Indian motorcycle, uses the cigar club as an office of sorts whenever he's in L.A., courtesy of a membership given to him by his manager. Dressed in blue jeans and a black sweater, Fishburne exhibits a striking physical presence and speaks in a mellifluous baritone that has more range than a mountain goat. But somehow he seems less physically substantial in flesh and blood than he does on the flimsy expanse of a movie screen.

As Morpheus in The Matrix, last year's box-office bonanza costarring Keanu Reeves, he led the revolt of the humans against the almighty cyborgs. As Bumpy Johnson in 1997's Hoodlum, he brought a 1930s Harlem warlord back to life. Fishburne is the guy who played the great Moor himself (he was the first African American to do so on-screen) opposite Kenneth Branagh in the 1995 film version of Othello, and he channeled Ike Turner as the songwriting Svengali who smacked Tina (Angela Bassett) around like a tetherball in What's Love Got to Do with It. He is a man of tremendous gravitas and stillness, an actor who has the bearing and sensibility of a philosopher king. Come on. What's he got to be nervous about?

"This isn't going to be like, 'Let's talk about the character you play in this film,'" Fishburne speculates dismally about the publicity bear hug awaiting him for this fall's opening of Once in the Life, a movie he wrote, directed, produced and stars in. "This whole thing is mine. It's all me. I'm the one on the spot." What's more, Fishburne put himself in a role nobody else would have thought to offer an actor whose screen and stage reputation is built on strong, stoic types - the hero who unerringly sees through the bullshit, the immovable rock in the middle of the narrative stream. In Life, Fishburne plays 20-20 Mike, an ineffectual, nonconfrontational borderline buffoon. But maybe the casting is not so far-fetched. "You know," he says, laughing, "I have those qualities as well."

As he makes his way through the nearly empty club, motorcycle helmet in hand, Fishburne runs into fellow New York actor Hector Elizondo, probably best known as Dr. Phillip Watters in the television drama Chicago Hope. With their jazz-like riffing - a rim-shot rhythm of imitations and reminiscences - the two transform the exclusive Beverly Hills room into a New York street corner. For Fishburne, the chance encounter serves as a reconnect to the subways and cityscapes that form the backdrop of his new movie, which is in turn based on his 1994 off-Broadway play, Riff Raff. Set in uptown Manhattan and a Brooklyn only the dead know, Once in the Life is a snap-crackle-and-hip-hop meditation on blood ties and old neighborhood loyalties triggered by a drug heist gone bad. Fishburne stars alongside Titus Welliver (CBS's Brooklyn South), Eamonn Walker (HBO's Oz), Gregory Hines and Annabella Sciorra.

"I'm from Brooklyn," says Mark Urman, copresident of Lions Gate Films, Life's distributor, "and I'm impressed with the places, the marginal New York, that Laurence chose to shoot. Clearly he went the extra distance; he went after the real New York." Fishburne's manager and producing partner, Helen Sugland, concurs. "Laurence has always been a New Yorker, even though he's come out here for years," she says. "It's where his heart and spirit are."

On a deeper level, the 39-year-old Fishburne is, for lack of a better word, an artist, one of those rare souls able to tap into energies not their own. "He was an artist before he was born," says Alfre Woodard, who won a 1997 Emmy playing opposite him in HBO's Miss Evers' Boys, a critically praised drama (which Fishburne also produced) about a medical study that kept African American men from receiving treatment for syphilis for 40 years. "He can deliver a product so clear and engaging that people don't realize what he has mastered."

While it's a fatuous commonplace to say that movie stars are in the business "to practice their craft," nothing about Fishburne or his career suggests any other interpretation. His mother, a high school math and science teacher, began taking him to acting auditions when he was only 10. "She was really astute in observing that I was very happy and at home when I was performing," says Fishburne. "I feel fortunate she was paying attention." As an actor he grew hothouse-fast. In his first year as a professional, he was acting off-off-Broadway; by 12 he was a regular on ABC's One Life to Live. He was 14 when he landed the role of an underage gunner on a navy patrol boat in Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now. Years later, in Hearts of Darkness, Eleanor Coppola's documentary on the making of the movie, Fishburne would recall, "Me, I was a kid, which is what that war was all about: kids who didn't know anything about anything, snatched up and used as cannon fodder." Keeping that in mind, he became a national ambassador for the U.S. Fund for UNICEF in 1996, dedicating his efforts to the rehabilitation of child soldiers.

Serving his 18 months in Coppola's grande armee propelled Fishburne far forward as an actor, but it took him years to grow into himself personally. Always busy working, he never really had time to be a child. His exposure to the wisdom of older black performers, however, freed and focused him in other ways. "Whatever energy they were carrying I was able to receive," he says, "sometimes subtly, sometimes unawares and sometimes just by someone saying 'Hey, sit down, this is serious business we're doing here.'" Fishburne was 16 when he finally left the Philippines and the set of "Apocalypse When," as the film had come to be called. In the next 10 years, he appeared in three more Coppola movies--Rumblefish, The Cotton Club and Gardens of Stone - as well as Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple. To keep the wolf from the door, he also took some less memorable roles: Death Wish II and Nightmare on Elm Street III. When he was 26, his wife, Hajna Moss, a casting director, gave birth to their son Langston, and Fishburne took stock of his life in a big way. "It was like, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa, what's missing?'" he remembers. "That was the moment I said to myself, 'Who do I want to be in the eyes of this person who is going to look up to me as an example of how to live?'"

By then, the Georgia-born Fishburne had endured the de rigueur struggling-actor existence in Los Angeles (Venice Beach Division) and returned to Brooklyn to move in with his father, a corrections officer, and to hang out with the Greek chorus of hustlers and hypes who would inspire the gritty dialogue of Riff Raff, a project that Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson nurtured until Fishburne's late-night journal outpourings grew into scenes and structure, a drama. "August would keep asking me, 'Are you writing?'" says the actor. "He told me I didn't need to hire a playwriting teacher - all I needed was to be fearless. So I just kept muddling through until I got my first draft."

By 1993, Fishburne's six-year marriage had dissolved (the couple, who remain close, have a second child, a girl named Montana). Meanwhile, he had gained recognition for meaty roles: the righteous radical Dap Dunlap in Spike Lee's 1988 School Daze and the excitable assassin Jimmy Jump in Abel Ferrara's 1990 King of New York. Just as audiences were becoming more familiar with his volatile screen personas, he changed direction. "I want to be able to make people think," he says, "change their minds about whatever their preconceived notions are."

"Like everyone else," says Stockard Channing, who played Eleanor of Aquitaine to Fishburne's Henry II in the 1999 Broadway revival of The Lion in Winter, "I thought Laurence was very daunting and brilliant. But it turns out he's the nicest guy - wonderful to the whole company, enormously playful. He's here to enjoy this world, and he does. He likes to have fun." As an actor, says Woodard, "he's the ultimate tango partner. You spin and lay out because you know he's going to catch you. At the same time, he can make you hoot and laugh all day long. He is deeply sexy and incredibly goofy. I don't mean funny, I mean goofy. You know those bumper stickers, I'D RATHER BE SKIING, I'D RATHER BE SAILING? Well, I'd rather be Fishburne-ing."

Diana Krall, the Grammy-nominated torch singer and jazz pianist, saw Fishburne on Bravo's Inside the Actor's Studio one afternoon and called her mother into the room to announce she absolutely had to meet this guy - which she did soon after through a fortuitous mix-up. Fishburne, she says, "can talk about anything and do anything he wants really well. He's amazingly musical and would have probably been a musician if he wasn't an actor. He can listen to a tune two or three times and know all the lyrics. He's very family oriented, though. He just gets it done. And he wants to do a million things."

In a way, much of what Fishburne has projected on film derives from a sense of responsibility to his talent. "If you have a gift," he notes, "it doesn't suffice just that you've got it. You leave it hanging out there - the wind will come by strong one day, pick it up and take it away from you." He sees himself as a tragedian and feels connected to Greek theater. "Now, I ain't Greek, and I ain't English, neither," he says, "but I am part of this continuum, this 3,000-year-old tradition." Whatever he learned osmotically as a young actor, whatever ancestral or black community memory he was able to tap into, Fishburne believes fervently in passing on to others.

And so in 1986, on his first day playing Cowboy Curtis on the television series Pee-wee's Playhouse, Fishburne asked a guy named John Singleton, a security guard pining to be a production assistant, if he wanted a doughnut and cup of coffee. A friendship was struck. Four years later, Singleton, who was finishing film school at USC, sent Fishburne a copy of his screenplay, Boyz N the Hood. The 22-year-old director wanted the actor to play the father figure, Furious Styles, who was modeled after Singleton's own father and, in part, Fishburne himself. Fishburne leaped at the chance.

"I'd never directed actors before, so I'd ask Fish, 'What does Coppola do?'" says Singleton, whose film became one of the best slice-of-L.A. movies ever made and earned him Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay in 1991. "And that's how we conducted the rehearsal process - not reading the lines but doing improv, looking for the characters the way Coppola does." Fishburne's turn as the hard-driving father who teaches manhood to his son (Cuba Gooding Jr.) is one of his finest to date.

Fishburne's performances have been both popularly rewarded and critically acclaimed. In 1992, he won a Tony for his role as Sterling Johnson in the Broadway production of Wilson's Two Trains Running; in 1993, he got an Emmy for his part as Martin in the kickoff episode of Tribeca, Robert De Niro's short-lived series for Fox, and his stunning portrayal of Ike Turner garnered an Oscar nod. The latter surprises him. "Yeah, everybody loves it," he says, mystified by what seems to him an oversimplification of a complex man. But to audiences, Fishburne's genius tapped into Ike's tortured rage at his wife's success. The actor switched from sullen to homicidal with the twitch of a muscle, letting his own identity sink without a trace beneath the wacky '60s and '70s hair and clothing styles. Late in the film, falling asleep on a hotel couch after a last knock-down-drag-out with Bassett's Tina, Fishburne-as-Ike lets out a tiny whimper, conjuring up one of those crystalline moments of recognition: The cruel tyrant is also a helpless embryo.

Singleton calls Fishburne "a reluctant movie star." Sidney Poitier would agree. Over lunch a few years back, Fishburne remembers, "Sidney said to me, 'When you're a star' - and he leaned over and said very carefully, 'and you are a star - you have to take very good care of yourself.' And that was the moment when I thought, 'You know, from him, I'll take that.' Because people have been telling me that since I was 10 years old, and I was always like, 'I'm just Joe Neckbone, man.' And you know what? I am Joe Neckbone, sometimes. But I am this other thing, too, and it's something I have to work at every day. It doesn't just come naturally to me."

Maybe Fishburne slips into his alter egos so easily because sometimes, as he sees it, "they pick me. I didn't pick Morpheus, at least not consciously." This winter, he is heading down under to reinhabit his Matrix character and shoot the film's prequel and sequel, both directed by brothers Andy and Larry Wachowski. Once again, Fishburne, his sunglasses a trope for perception, will portray the Nobleman of Nature, that fond philosophical hobby-horse of the Enlightenment.

"I'm so grateful for The Matrix," he says, "because Morpheus has been burned into the subconscious of 12-year-old kids. Which means that, if I play my cards right, I can be around for a very long time."