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Wesley Snipes
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Biography from Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia:
This commanding and versatile actor got his first big break not in a feature film or TV series, but in a music video: he was the gang leader who threatened Michael Jackson in his enormously popular video "Bad" (1987). He'd already appeared in supporting roles in Wildcats (1986) and Streets of Gold (1986); after the video exposure, he made strong impressions in the baseball comedy Major League (1989), Abel Ferrara's King of New York (1990), and Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues (1990). But Snipes really came into his own in 1991, in a pair of sharply contrasting performances: first as a vicious but stylish druglord in the melodramatic New Jack City then as a middleclass architect who becomes romantically involved with a white woman in Spike Lee's Jungle Fever The two-picture parlay made him a star. Snipes cemented his lead status as a basketball hustler in the popular comedy White Men Can't Jump (1992, opposite Wildcats costar Woody Harrelson), then gave one of his best performances as a paraplegic in The Waterdance (1992). He toplined his first action film in 1993, Passenger 57 and played a credible cop in the film-noirish Boiling Point (1993), then costarred in the high-profile thriller Rising Sun (1993) with Sean Connery. He bleached his hair to play a larger-than-life, futuristic villain opposite Sylvester Stallone in Demolition Man (1993), then returned to the streets of Harlem for the starring vehicle Sugar Hill (1994). He starred in yet another action opus, Drop Zone (1994), then played a drag queen in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995). |  |
