Although born in Georgia, Fishburne was raised by his divorced mother in Brooklyn. It was she who encouraged him to be an actor and young Larry (as he was then billed) began his professional career with a New York stage debut at age ten. For three years (from 1973 to 1976), he portrayed adoptee Joshua West Hall on the ABC soap opera "One Life to Live" and made his film debut as the "Me" in "Cornbread, Earl and Me" (1975). After 18 months filming in the Philippines, Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" (1979) brought him to mainstream attention, and he subsequently appeared in the director's "Rumble Fish" (1983), "The Cotton Club" (1984) and "Gardens of Stone" (1987). Other prominent roles included playing Swain in Steven Spielberg's "The Color Purple" (1986) and Afro-centrist Dap Dunlap in Spike Lee's "School Daze" (1988).

Fishburne starred as a loose cannon former convict in the 1990 world premiere of August Wilson's "Two Trains Running" at Yale Repertory Theater and recreated the role on Broadway in 1992, winning several prizes including a Tony Award. After his no-holds barred histrionics elevated his psychotic killer in "The King of New York" (1990) above that of a garden-variety thug, he provided the moral center of "Boyz N The Hood" (1991) as Furious Styles, a model father who steers his son away from L.A. gang life, then radiated a sullen intensity as an undercover cop in Bill Duke's edgy thriller, "Deep Cover" (1992). On the heels of his winning an Emmy for a guest appearance in the 1992 Fox anthology series "Tribeca", Fishburne earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his riveting, unflattering portrait of 60s pop star Ike Turner, so critical to the success of the Tina Turner biopic "What's Love Got to Do With It" (1993), which reunited the actor with Angela Bassett, his estranged wife in "Boyz". He also lent solid support as a streetwise chess player in the underrated "Searching for Bobby Fischer" (also 1993).

In 1995, Fishburne appeared in four diverse features. In John Singleton's "Higher Learning", he was an articulate political science professor attempting to motivate his apathetic students. Underutilized as a spy paired with Ellen Barkin in "Bad Company", he delivered the goods as a tough cop resentful of the investigations of a law professor (Sean Connery) in "Just Cause". And despite never having performed Shakespeare before, Fishburne made screen history as the first black actor to portray the Bard's Moor in a major studio film in Oliver Parker's "Othello". 1995 saw Fishburne make his Off-Broadway debut as a playwright and director with "Riff-Raff", a popular, loosely structured drama about an African-American con man (Fishburne) and his relationship with a white junkie, which he adapted into the feature "Once in the Life" (2000). Also that year, the actor delivered an Emmy-nominated turn as a courageous WWII pilot in the superior HBO movie "The Tuskegee Airmen.”

Reuniting with Bill Duke, Fishburne executive produced and starred in "Hoodlum" (1997), essaying real-life Harlem racketeer 'Bumpy' Johnson, on whom his "The Cotton Club" character had been based. The extremely watchable Depression-era film benefited greatly from the fresh angle its black point-of-view brought to a fairly well-known historical account, and Fishburne displayed a great range of emotions lurking under Bumpy's seemingly placid exterior. He pulled down his second Emmy as executive producer of the universally acclaimed "Miss Evers' Boys" (HBO, 1997), a dramatization of the Tuskegee Study, a shameful medical experiment in which the US Public Health Service withheld treatment from a group of African-American men with syphilis to examine the effects. Fishburne also co-starred as an early participant in the study who romances Alfre Woodard's nurse Eunice Evers. After executive producing and starring as Socrates Fortlow in HBO's "Always Outnumbered" (1998), he enjoyed his biggest commercial success to date with the sci-fi actioner "The Matrix" (1999). Finding a balance between action hero and Zen Master, Fishburne offered a commanding presence as the mysterious revolutionary Morpheus, but it was the arresting visual style of its writer-directors (the Wachowski brothers) that attracted the hordes through the turnstiles.

After the mega-success of "The Matrix," Fishburne took his first turn behind the camera as the director of "Once in the Life" (2000), an adaptation of his 1994 play "Riff Raff" in which he starred as two-bit hood 20/20 Mike, a supposed expert at self-preservation whose world is thrown into chaos when his white junkie half-brother fouls up a heroin heist. The film was well-acted and handsomely filmed, but suffered from the claustrophobic confines of its theatrical origins. Fishburne next appeared in the fast-paced action film "Biker Boyz" (2003) as Smoke, the reigning champion among a ring of African American professionals by day who become motorcycle street racers by night. That same year he returned to the role of Morpheus--now exchanging his signature cool for volume and bravado in Morpheus' new incarnation as a borderline zealot--for "The Matrix Reloaded" and its filmed-back-to-back sequel, "The Matrix Revolutions."

The actor was then used to strong effect by director Clint Eastwood in "Mystic River" (2003), playing police detective Whitey Powers, who doubts the ability of his partner (Kevin Bacon) to stay impartial on a homicide case involving two of his childhood friends (Sean Penn and Tim Robbins). Next it was on to the role of a powerful crime kingpin whose arrest provokes an all-out invasion of a police precinct house in the well-assembled 2005 remake of the thriller "Assault on Precinct 13." Fishburne next costarred alongside Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Michelle Monaghan in “Mission: Impossible 3” (2006), the third installment to the popular spy franchise—directed this time by “Lost” creator J.J. Abrams—that depicted a retired Ethan Hunt (Cruise) living a slower-paced life while training new IMF agents. But he’s called back to action to due battle with Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman), an international weapons dealer who may turn out to be Hunt’s toughest adversary yet.