LaTanya Richardson walked into the kitchen and found her husband lying unconscious on the floor, surrounded by drugs. Their daughter, barely eight years old, was there, watching everything.
That day in 1990 marked a turning point for Samuel L. Jackson. The actor, born in Washington D.C. in 1948, had spent years battling an addiction that threatened to erase any chance of a career. He entered rehab determined never to return to that low point.
Months later, Spike Lee gave him the role of a crack addict in ‘Jungle Fever’, a character that took him all the way to Cannes. But it was in 1994, as Jules Winnfield in ‘Pulp Fiction’, that Jackson found something more than fame: he found a way to tell his own redemption story in front of millions of people. Years later, in a 2012 TED Talk, he dared to say it out loud.
