If he never did anything else, Samuel L. Jackson guaranteed himself eternal cult status in the final scene of Pulp Fiction when his character, the philosophical, Afro-coiffed hit-man, Jules, asks Pumpkin, played by Tim Roth, if he reads the Bible. "There's a passage I got memorised," Jules tells him, launching into the quotation from Ezekiel 25:17 that begins: "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men."
Jackson's passionately forceful delivery of that Biblical quotation crowned his wonderfully droll and vividly etched portrayal of Jules as Pulp Fiction neared its closing credits, ensuring Jackson's new iconic status and his first Oscar nomination.
However, it's hardly as if he never did anything else. Ubiquitous is one word that describes Samuel L. Jackson, an actor who never seems to stop working. Versatile is another. Last month he could be seen on screen at the Dublin Film Festival, playing an adulterous Louisiana doctor in Eve's Bayou, which also marks his debut as a producer. Last week he was playing a brash, small-time Reno crook in Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight at the IFC in Dublin.
In Kevin Reynolds's 187, newly released on video here, Jackson plays a despairing science teacher struggling to cope with unruly and even homicidal students. He plays a mathematician, co-starring with Sharon Stone and Dustin Hoffman, in Barry Levinson's underwater science-fiction yarn, Sphere, a Michael Crichton adaptation which went on release in Ireland yesterday. And he's back in Tarantino territory, as a characteristically loquacious character, this time an arms dealer, in Jackie Brown, which opens here next Friday.
Filmographers would need to be very diligent indeed to keep track of Samuel L. Jackson's prolific output, which has amounted to over 30 movie roles so far this decade. When we met recently, the actor referred to his talent as "a blessing". Having long kicked his drugs and drink habits, Jackson looks radiantly healthy and much younger than his 49 years. His head adorned by little redlensed glasses and matching back-to-front red beret, he looks very stylish in a white v-necked T-shirt and black trousers.
"Dressing is a mood thing with me," he says. "You get up in the morning and you feel a certain way and want to dress a certain way. I pretty much know my wardrobe now and there are certain colours that make me feel better about approaching the day, and other colours I use if I'm going out to play golf, like I plan to do today."
Green is best if it's a day when he's seeing his agents, he says. Blue is for a mellow day "where I just want to groove through the day, try and smile at people and not have any hassles". And yellow means "a kind of mischievous day, like I'm probably going to be getting snappy with people". He goes on to enthuse about the new Hugo Boss golf line that has "great yellows, pinks and light blues". Golf and working hard have firmly replaced drink and drugs in his life - "I can play 54 holes a day," he declares.
Turning to his work-rate, Jackson says that he relishes the diversity of his roles. "I believe in disappearing into my roles, no matter what the character is like," he says. "Do you remember when the Oscars did the tribute to Laurence Olivier? They showed this image of his face on the screen and gradually morphed it from one of his movie roles into another. The audience was reminded of all the different ways he looked and all those great parts. Imagine doing that with an actor who was exactly the same person in every role?'."
Samuel L. Jackson - the middle initial stands for Leroy - was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1949, where he was raised by his mother and her parents; his father lived in Kansas City. "I was brought up in a segregated Tennessee," he says. "There were times when I would be ill and we didn't have access to doctors apart from one who might or might not call and might or might not have been in town. There were two women in our neighbourhood whom we called the `root ladies' because they has an intimate knowledge of herbal medicine passed down from African culture. So if you were ill you would go to these ladies and they would concoct something that made you better."
His mother wanted the young Samuel Leroy to become a doctor, but when he went to Morehouse College in Atlanta he chose to study marine biology. He turned to drama as a way of dealing with a stuttering problem which made him feel so self-conscious that, he says, he did not speak for a whole year when he was in fourth grade. He auditioned for a college musical and met LaTanya Richardson, a theatre arts student, and they with some friends founded the Just Us Theatre Company in Atlanta.
He and LaTanya moved to Harlem in 1972 and were married eight years later. They both acted with the Negro Ensemble Company and the New York Shakespeare Festival, and Samuel started to get some supporting roles in movies, making one of his earliest appearances down the credits of Milos Forman's 1981 Ragtime.
In 1990, the playwright, August Wilson, offered him the leading role in the pre-Broadway run of The Piano Lesson, on the condition that Charles S. Dutton, who was acting in a movie at the time, would take over the role when the play opened on Broadway and that Jackson would be his understudy. Jackson went from the best of times to the worst of times, and he says he sat there backstage every night while Dutton performed the role he originated. The more Jackson felt sorry for himself, the deeper he got into drink and drugs.
With the encouragement and support of his wife, he quit and asked Spike Lee to cast him as the volatile crack addict in Jungle Fever, telling Lee he already had done all the research. Jackson's chilling performance, eerily catching the character's combination of desperation and danger, earned him the best supporting actor award at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, the only time the festival has made such an award, and it springboarded his film career.
Reluctantly leaving the stage behind, he moved from one movie to another - everything from Patriot Games to Juice to Johnny Suede to Jurassic Park. "I would love to go back and work in the theatre, but I haven't had a window," he says. "I was about to do a play at one point and my agent found out and immediately found some new movie for me to do. I guess it's kind of hard to put gas in his Mercedes on 10 per cent of a theatre salary! So now, as soon as I mention the word `theatre', everyone starts scrambling to find me a movie. But I miss the stage."
The film work opportunities dictated a move to the west coast, to the San Fernando Valley where he lives with his wife - LaTanya also will be on our screens this month in the Fugitive sequel, US Marshals, with Wesley Snipes and Tommy Lee Jones. They have one daughter, 15-year-old Zoe. "When she got to be 12, my wife couldn't dress her any more like that doll she'd been dressing for years. So there was this woman-to-woman thing and I was the referee.
"That lasted about a year when Zoe was in transition and we had these external conversations where I noticed we didn't talk about real things. But now we can have proper conversations and we hang out together. When I was shooting Jackie Brown, I was at home, so she would come to work with me."
In between his two Tarantino movies, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, Jackson worked on a succession of movies that ranged from the big-budget action of Die Hard With A Vengeance with Bruce Willis and The Long Kiss Goodnight with Geena Davis, to much smaller productions such as The Great White Hype (in which he hilariously impersonated the boxing promoter, Don King); Trees Lounge (in which he did a cameo for his friend, Steve Buscemi); and Eve's Bayou, his first film as a producer.
Actress Kasi Lemmons makes her debut as a writer-director with Eve's Bayou, which has been warmly received in America and compared to the novels of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. Set in a small Louisiana town in 1962, the drama is seen through the eyes of the 10-year-old daughter of the wealthy but philandering local doctor played by Samuel L. Jackson. The cast also features Lynn Whitfield, Debbie Morgan, Diahann Carroll and Kasi Lemmons's husband, Gridlock'd director and Chicago Hope actor Vondie Curtis Hall.
"Kasi and I have been friends forever," says Jackson. "We spent a lot of time pounding the streets together in New York in the seventies. I kind of fell into producing it because I was at a stage where I was able to put my name up there to help raise the finance. But when we got to the location none of the other producers was there and when problems arose all eyes would turn to me. I was like the guy hosting the barbecue. I had to be the quiet in the storm. That's OK with me. I'm pretty low-key. I don't get excited and waste energy."
He was intrigued by the conflicted nature of the adulterous character he plays in Eve's Bayou. "Louisiana people are like Irish people, I guess, in that they can't get divorced," he says. They can now in Ireland, I tell him. "Oh, really? I didn't know that. But, you know, what I really liked about playing that man was that he was for real and the movie had real human concerns. You don't get that much in Hollywood where they're always looking for the elements that make money - guns, car chases, aliens, dinosaurs and sex."
He found it refreshing to return to the South again, and easy to fall back into all the old rhythms, because of the similarities between Louisiana and Tennessee. "Being in the bayou, there's a whole culture that we had to absorb and get into it," he says. "There's this whole rich heritage they hold on to, especially the Cajuns, and we had to learn what that was and that whole sense of pride they have in it. The locale became a real character. The only drawback was the mosquitoes - they were huge and I've never been bitten in the face before."
Being a producer was not, as he puts it, the most fun he ever had in his life, but it was educational for him. "I'd like to do it again because there are several projects in development that I know I'll end up producing, so it's good to have learned what I did. I've optioned some projects. They're kind of offbeat, not quite mainstream. One's a mystery, one's a science-fiction story, and another is a very offbeat story about the Americanisation of another culture. Different kinds of ideas, really - and a lot more interesting than the scripts I usually receive."
One script which he received and accepted without a hint of hesitation was Quentin Tarantino's adaptation of Elmore Leonard's novel, Rum Punch, in Jackie Brown. Jackson's character is heard before he is seen in the movie. This is how he is introduced in Tarantino's screenplay: "The Black Voice belongs to 45year-old Ordell Robbie. Ordell wears clothes nice and likes wearing nice clothes. Stylish athletic wear (Reebok), heavy, black leather jackets (Hugo Boss), warm-coloured berets and baseball caps to cover his balding head, are Ordell's `look'. At this moment, Ordell's wearing an open silk shirt."
Samuel L. Jackson describes Ordell Robbie as "one total villain of a man, but there's more to him than that. He's a small-time arms dealer and he hires Jackie Brown, a flight attendant, to bring money back and forth from Mexico. The characters are all these low-lifes crossing and double-crossing each other - and using that Quentin Tarantino dialogue. I hope it was as much fun for you as it was for us to do it. We had a great time doing it - not that that's always a measure of success."
The last word on Jackson goes to Tarantino: "I honestly think any director who was casting this role would give his right arm to be able to get Sam. The combination of a bad guy who projects absolute menace and danger but is also eloquent and intelligent which just makes him even scarier. Who else would do that as well as Sam can do it?"