History will be made at tomorrow night's Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles if, as many expect, the Oscar for best actor goes to Denzel Washington for his performance in The Hurricane. Winning the award would make Washington, now 46, the first black actor in cinema history to win two Oscars, having received the 1989 best supporting actor award for Glory. And he would become only the second black actor to win an Oscar for a leading role, following Sidney Poitier's victory for Lillies of the Field way back in 1963.
Incredibly, in the 71-year history of the Academy Awards only six black actors have won Oscars. The other four winners, all for supporting roles, have been Hattie McDaniel for Gone With the Wind in 1939, Louis Gosset Jr for An Officer and a Gentleman in 1982, Whoopi Goldberg for Ghost in 1991 and Cuba Gooding Jr for Jerry Maguire in 1996.
Two of the 20 acting nominees for tomorrow night's Oscars are black - Michael Clarke Duncan for The Green Mile and Washington - and both are nominated for films in which they play convicted multiple murderers who spend most or all of the film in prison. Both were later declared innocent, victims of a racist justice system.
While the Duncan character is a fictional creation by Stephen King, Washington's role is based on the boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter who, with another black man, was indicted for the murder of three white people in the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey, in the summer of 1966.
Carter's convictions were finally overturned in 1985 when Judge H. Lee Sarokin decided that the prosecution had committed "grave constitutional violations" and that the convictions were based on "racism rather than reasons, and concealment rather than disclosure."
Norman Jewison's film of Carter's experiences, The Hurricane, had been tipped as a major Oscar contender before it came under attack for simplifying the story and playing with the facts. When the nominations were announced last month, the only one which went to The Hurricane was for Washington's intense and arresting central performance as Carter.
When we met in London recently, Washington said he was not aware of the Carter case until he was approached about the film in 1992. "I'd never even heard of Rubin Carter before then," he says. "I'd never even heard the Bob Dylan song, Hurricane. The first time I knew about it was eight years ago when John Ketcham, who's one of the producers on the film, brought me Rubin's book, The Sixteenth Round. Then I went up to Canada to meet Rubin. It was a fascinating story and a great part, so I really wanted to do it. Then in 1997 they brought me a script and I said, I'm in."
When I ask Washington about the liberties which the movie takes with the facts, he replies: "You can't win unless you make a 58-hour movie, maybe. It's a movie, and that's it. It's impossible in any interpretation of the truth to get it exactly as it was, even if you filled it with all the real people and put a microphone in front of them.
"You get what they remember, and stories have a way of being distorted with time. I know when I was a kid I had one of my best football games and I said to this day that I scored six touchdowns. If we went back it was probably more like three touchdowns. But you know, after 10 years it became more like four and then five."
But are there not greater responsibilities involved in playing real-life characters, as Washington has in his portrayals of Malcolm X and Steve Biko and Rubin Carter? "There is a great deal of responsibility," he says. "Of the three real people you name I would say the greatest responsibility was Malcolm X, because he was the most popular - in America, anyway.
"With Rubin, initially there was pressure because he was still alive, you know. I spent a lot of time just talking to him, asking him questions, and I recorded hours and hours of conversations with him. As we got to know each other and as he trusted me with his life story, it became an incentive to do my job better. He wasn't peeping around the set to see if I was portraying him correctly. In fact, he didn't come around much at all. And I didn't feel any sense of pressure again until the time came for him to see the movie.
"You would think that somewhere inside him there would be a lot of bitterness and anger at what he went through. But I certainly never saw it, so if it is there he must get it out in the mornings by screaming or whatever before he comes outside. He's still very intense, but he's a sweet man, really, and quite mischievous at times.
"If you haven't been through something like he's been through, you can have all sorts of ideas about how you might feel in his position. What I think is that he left all that anger behind in the penitentiary when he was released. He went through a transformation, as we tried to illustrate in the film. He found a way to put that anger in the corner."
When Washington won the Golden Globe award for best dramatic actor in January, he brought Rubin Carter up to the podium with him. "That was just a spontaneous moment," he says. "I don't know if I'll bring him up on stage again if I get the Oscar. People might get the wrong impression. It just wasn't planned the first time."
A month after winning the Globe, Washington received the best actor award, the Silver Bear, at the recent Berlin Film Festival for The Hurricane, which reunites him with Norman Jewison, the film-maker who gave him his first meaty movie role in the 1984 A Soldier's Story. Washington, whose background was in theatre, was spotted by Jewison in the stage version of Charles Fuller's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which served as the basis for the film, a simmering drama set in the 1940s on a Louisiana army camp after an unpopular black officer has been murdered.
"I did that play in New York from October of 1981 until April of 1982, when I left to do what I thought was going to be a 13-week run of a TV series," says Washington. The series was the medical drama, St Else- where, and the 13 weeks extended to six years.
"But I was allowed to take regular breaks from it, off and on," he says. "I first left to do A Soldier's Story. The executive producer of St Elsewhere was Bruce Paltrow - and you know, I can remember his daughter Gwyneth running around as a 10year-old on the set. I grovelled to Bruce to get time off to do the film for Norman Jewison. He said there was no way he could deny me that opportunity, and he gave me time off again later in the series to do two more movies - Power for Sidney Lumet and Cry Freedom for Richard Attenborough."
Washington received his first Academy Award nomination for his heartfelt and moving portrayal of the black South African activist, Steve Biko, who was brutally murdered by the police, in Cry Freedom. In one of life's strange coincidences, it is noted in James S Hirsch's recent book, The Miraculous Journey of Rubin Carter, how Carter, when he was in South Africa for two prizefights in the 1960s, became involved in secretly running guns to Steve Biko.
When I mention this to Washington, he adds that Carter also knew and greatly admired Malcolm X, whom Washington played in a mesmerising performance in Spike Lee's rather uneven and didactic 1992 movie. And another coincidence is that Norman Jewison originally was planning to direct Malcolm X. "He was very interested," says Washington. "He worked on the script for a while and I met him a few times about it. There was a lot of pressure being applied at the time by Spike Lee, who really wanted to do it, but Norman said that wasn't the reason he backed out. He said he couldn't get the script the way he wanted it."
Washington has been remarkably prolific in the eight years since Malcolm X was released, demonstrating his versatility as he moved between standard mainstream fare - The Pelican Brief, Courage Under Fire, Crimson Tide, The Siege - and more adventurous roles in Philadelphia, Much Ado About Nothing, Mississippi Masala and Devil in a Blue Dress.
More recently, he took on one of his most demanding roles when he played a brilliant criminologist rendered quadriplegic after a near-fatal accident in The Bone Collector. Washington invested his character with charm, intelligence and authority in this often grisly and ludicrous thriller which confines his character to a bed for most of its duration.
"It got kinda boring a few times just lying there in a bed for about six weeks," he says. "I actually fell asleep at one stage during a take. Now that's relaxed! I've never done that before. That might have been harder to do than The Hurricane, because I was so limited in what I can do. Basically, I had to act with my eyes. That was all.
"But having met a lot of quadriplegics when I was preparing to make the movie, I knew they have those limitations in their lives, every day of their lives. That's what I remember about them, the stillness of their bodies which is like nothing I've ever seen before, and the way they look at you. It's so intense because everything about them is coming out through their eyes."
FOR the boxing sequences in The Hurricane Washington lost almost 60 pounds and got into serious training. "We trained for about 14 months from October 1997," he says. "It's like choreography in a way, especially when you're doing it for a film where it becomes a dance. It's real difficult, because the other guy's not standing there waiting for you to figure it out. It's conditioning, it's willpower. I have the utmost respect for a champion now that I understand to some small degree what a champion has to go through.
"It has made me like boxing even more. I like to fight. I hadn't done much before and it was a great thing to learn the art of how to fight - practising, missing punches, learning how to shoot straight punches and just staying right in there and learning the science of it. It really builds your self-esteem. Your body's tighter and your mind is clearer."
His mind went entirely blank, he says, on the night when he won his first Oscar, for his gritty performance as a runaway slave in the American Civil War drama, Glory: "It's an extraordinary experience to win. A few years ago I was a presenter at the Oscars and Matt Damon had just won the screenplay award for Good Will Hunting. I had worked with him on Courage Under Fire, so I knew him, and I was the first person he met when he came off the stage. He gave me such a hug that I didn't have to go to a chiropractor for months afterwards.
"The night I won I just totally blanked out. It was a weird thing. They said I was the front-runner, which was real pressure, I can tell you. Where have you got to go but down? So when they called my name I let out about two months of air and went up and was very relaxed and gave my speech.
"Then I walked off stage and Kevin Kline was there, waiting to present the next award. I walked over to him and said, `What happened?'. He said, `You won'. And I said, `Are you sure?'. It was like a dream. That's a heck of a moment, I can tell you. A billion people watching and one of them's your mother. For actors there's no greater accolade, no higher moment, than winning the Academy Award."
The Hurricane opens on April 7th