Cigar Aficionado continued

In essence he wanted a taste of the same freedom he had been given by Coppola almost two decades before. The director told him no.

Out of raw frustration, Fishburne took out his pen and began to write. "I started writing at night, late at night, just in a journal, and one night I started writing and I said, 'Shit, I know what that is; that's a scene.' So I just kept writing. And then I was doing it on the set. I would go and work and do a scene and then I'd go back and write." It was all flowing out of him, right into a pile of notebooks, but Fishburne had his doubts. He wasn't a trained writer. So he called his buddy August Wilson, the playwright, asking him, What should I do, man? Find myself a writing coach?

"'Nah,' Wilson said. 'You don't need any of that. What you need is fearlessness. Just keep writing and you'll be fine,'" Fishburne recalls. "And that was great, you know. It was like I was the plant and he just got in there and pruned me and offered me sunshine."

The result was Riff Raff, a one-act play that Fishburne wrote, directed and starred in. The play opened in Los Angeles in 1994 and then ran off-Broadway in New York. On one level, the story was about a drug heist gone bad. On another, it was about the poisons that eat away at family, brotherhood and community. The response to the play was very strong and Fishburne was hooked. He began thinking of turning Riff Raff into a screenplay, but that would have to wait.

A year later, Fishburne landed the lead in the film version of Shakespeare's Othello. Fishburne was the first African-American actor to play the brooding Moor on screen. For Fishburne, however, this was rugged new territory, his first classic role. How would Fishburne handle the Bard, where every word is carved in stone and steeped in tradition? And how would he fare against the great Shakespeare aficionado Kenneth Branagh? No problem.

"Shakespeare? Baddest shit that's ever been written in the English language," Fishburne says. "You can't argue with that shit, you know what I'm saying? Sometimes you're in situations where you get the freedom, and it's like, 'OK, baby, can you fly?' Then sometimes you get the other thing, and everything is really well thought out ahead of time. Then you don't rely so much on the moment of spontaneity, the moment of combustion. There's structure to it. There are rules. It's like the blues. Shakespeare's like that. But it doesn't make it any less beautiful."

After Othello, Fishburne decided to try his hand at producing. In 1997, he produced and starred as Caleb Humphries in the HBO movie Miss Evers' Boys, based on the true story of the infamous Tuskegee study. That was the misbegotten health experiment in which the U.S. Public Health Service knowingly withheld treatment from a group of African-American men with syphilis, in order to document the course of the disease. The TV special won five Emmys, a Golden Globe and three Image Awards. That year, Fishburne and his production partner, Helen Sugland, helped produce Hoodlum, a Prohibition-era drama in which Fishburne played legendary Harlem gangster Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson.