Cigar Aficionado continued

In the early 1980s, Fishburne went back on the hunt, looking for acting jobs that paid the bills and fit his credo. The man he gravitated to, of course, was Francis Coppola. The result was three more roles in Coppola pictures: Rumble Fish in 1983, Cotton Club in 1984 and Gardens of Stone in 1987. These, too, were the years when Fishburne was getting married and becoming a father; one can imagine that the balancing act was anything but simple.

Fishburne's talent came into full flower in the 1990s. He feels the breakthrough film was the 1990 violence-drenched crime thriller King of New York, in which he played a whacko hit man named Jimmy Jump, opposite Christopher Walken. Fishburne had been coming out of a period of volcanic anger in his work and in his private life, and he feels he was able to project that into the role and clear it from his system. As he puts it, "I just got rid of a lot of shit that I don't have to carry around with me anymore."

The upshot of that cleansing was evident in his next big role, the one that proclaimed Fishburne to be an actor of the highest caliber: Boyz N the Hood. In director John Singleton's powerful portrayal of life and death in south-central Los Angeles, Fishburne gave a riveting performance as Furious Styles, the only father in the 'hood with the brass and the clarity to keep his son, Tre, played by Cuba Gooding Jr., from winding up like several of his pals: in jail or dead. In Tre's eyes, Furious is huge. He's a towering, archetypal father figure who is warm and understanding or tough and unbending when need be. Fishburne obviously didn't have to look far to find a model from whom to draw.

From Boyz N the Hood, Fishburne's career began to soar; he was now an artist with his wings fully spread. He brought home a string of acclaimed performances: As a wily undercover narcotics agent in Deep Cover. As a street-wise chess hustler and mentor in Searching for Bobby Fischer. As the searing, coke-snorting, wife-beating pop music star Ike Turner in What's Love Got to Do With It . That portrayal won him an Oscar nomination. He also did a rare turn on television, in a 1993 episode of Tribeca, a short-lived series produced by Robert De Niro. That performance earned him an Emmy.

In this same period, Fishburne was still sharpening his tools on the stage. In 1992, he took Broadway by storm with his portrayal of Sterling Johnson in playwright August Wilson's Two Trains Running. That earned Fishburne a Tony and a slew of other awards. "The theater, man, you do it every night, whether you feel like it or not," Fishburne says. "You don't even realize it, but every night you're just out there building that muscle."

Building muscle, sharpening his tools, always looking for new creative juice--Fishburne's essential quest had not changed from the days of Apocalypse Now. And therein hides what can be a curse: You always want more. You always want to go deeper. You always want to keep on growing. And that can lead to mountains of frustration. When he was portraying Vinnie, the chess hustler in Searching for Bobby Fischer, Fishburne wanted to go deeper. He wanted to inject Vinnie with a kinky little twist. The powers that be said no. When he was playing Tanny Brown, the wicked cop in the thriller Just Cause, opposite Sean Connery, again Fishburne wanted more, he wanted to go deeper, add a few twists of his own.