Eddie Murphy

Eddie Murphy: The Kid Who Saved Saturday Night

When *Rolling Stone* ranked all 141 people who had ever been in the *Saturday Night Live* cast, it put Eddie Murphy second, behind only John Belushi, and explained the placement in one sentence: "Eddie Murphy is the only reason SNL survived the five-year wilderness." He was nineteen when he joined. Within four years he would be the biggest box-office star in the world, and he would spend the following four decades demonstrating both what that kind of talent can do and how thoroughly it can be squandered.

Bushwick

Edward Regan Murphy was born on 3 April 1961 in Brooklyn and raised in Bushwick. His mother, Lillian, was a telephone operator. His father, Charles Edward Murphy, was a transit police officer and an amateur comedian, murdered in 1969 in what Murphy has described as a crime of passion; Eddie was eight and retains, by his own account, only very dim memories of him. When his mother fell ill, he and his older brother Charlie spent a year in foster care — an experience Murphy has credited with forming his comic sensibility, which is a bleaker origin story than his public image usually carries.

Al Green at the Youth Center

At fifteen he heard a Richard Pryor album and decided what he was going to do. He dates the career to 9 July 1976, when he performed an Al Green impersonation at the Roosevelt Youth Center. From Peter Sellers he took the technique that would become his signature — playing several characters within one piece — and his other declared influences ran through Bill Cosby, Redd Foxx, Robin Williams, Muhammad Ali, Bruce Lee and Chaplin. He worked local clubs while quietly skipping school, and his mother's response was to make him attend summer school.

Live from New York

He joined *SNL* in 1980, wrote for it from 1982 to 1984, and effectively carried a programme in freefall. The characters became national property: Buckwheat, the grown-up Little Rascal; Mr. Robinson, a streetwise parody of Fred Rogers that Rogers himself found funny; and a cynical Gumby whose "I'm Gumby, dammit!" entered the language. When audiences would not stop demanding Buckwheat, Murphy had the character assassinated on camera outside 30 Rockefeller Plaza — a nineteen-year-old executing a hostile takeover of his own catchphrase.

Delirious and Raw

The stand-up ran in parallel and was, at the time, enormous. *Delirious* was filmed in Washington in 1983; *Eddie Murphy Raw*, shot at Madison Square Garden's Felt Forum in 1987, grossed $50 million as a theatrical release, which is a startling number for one man alone on a stage. Britannica characterises the act as largely personal and observational, at times raunchy, with a particular gift for impersonation. It was also indiscriminate in its targets, satirising WASPs, Black Americans, Italian Americans, overweight people and gay people, and the album *Eddie Murphy: Comedian* won the Grammy for Best Comedy Recording.

The Biggest Star in Hollywood

*48 Hrs.* (1982), opposite Nick Nolte, was a Christmas hit. *Trading Places* (1983) with Dan Aykroyd was bigger. Then *Beverly Hills Cop* (1984), his first solo lead, took over $230 million domestically, becoming the year's highest-grossing film and the highest-grossing comedy made to that point; *Beverly Hills Cop II* followed in 1987 with nearly $300 million worldwide. *Coming to America* (1988) put the Sellers technique on full display and filled its supporting roles with Black actors including Samuel L. Jackson and Cuba Gooding Jr. The misses were spectacular in their own way: he turned down *Ghostbusters* to make *Beverly Hills Cop* — "it sounded ridiculous to me, and I passed on it. And afterwards, I was like, 'Oh, that's amazing'" — and also passed on *Who Framed Roger Rabbit* and *Driving Miss Daisy*. *Trading Places* left a stranger monument: Section 746 of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which bans trading on misappropriated government information, is informally called the Eddie Murphy Rule.

The Long Slump and the Second Act

From 1989 the reviews turned. *Harlem Nights*, which he directed, produced and co-wrote, is his only film behind the camera. *Beverly Hills Cop III* (1994) was panned and he later denounced it himself. Spike Lee attacked him publicly for not using his leverage to open doors for Black actors. *The Adventures of Pluto Nash* (2002) took $7 million against a $110 million budget, one of the worst returns in the history of the business.

But the same stretch contains his best work. *The Nutty Professor* (1996) gave him a family of characters to inhabit at once, and Chris Rock has said flatly that Murphy was robbed of an Oscar for it. Family films rebuilt him commercially — *Mulan* and *Dr. Dolittle* in 1998, then Donkey in the *Shrek* franchise from 2001, which won him an Annie Award and a BAFTA nomination, still the only voice performance ever nominated by BAFTA. *Bowfinger* (1999) with Steve Martin was a genuine critical success. And in *Dreamgirls* (2006) he played the soul singer James "Thunder" Early and took the Golden Globe, the SAG award and an Academy Award nomination. He lost to Alan Arkin — critics blamed the reviews for *Norbit*, released weeks before the vote — and walked out of the ceremony immediately.

Why Eddie Is Called a Genius

The claim is about performance craft, not intellect, and Murphy has never pretended otherwise. What the skill actually consists of is three things. First, impersonation and character construction: taking the Peter Sellers device of playing multiple roles and executing it so completely that in *Coming to America*, *The Nutty Professor* and *Bowfinger* the separate characters have distinct vocal placement, rhythm and physical logic rather than distinct wigs. Second, timing under pressure — he was nineteen, generating original characters weekly, on a live show in collapse, and *Rolling Stone*'s verdict that he alone kept it alive is a technical judgement about output as much as a compliment. Third, sheer command of a room: *Raw* grossed $50 million with one man and a microphone.

The counter-case is unusually well documented. He turned down *Ghostbusters*, *Roger Rabbit* and *Driving Miss Daisy*, and regrets all three. He directed once. He spent roughly fifteen years in commercial and critical decline, capped by a film that lost over $100 million. Spike Lee's charge that he did not use his power for other Black performers landed at the time, whatever the later record shows. His single Oscar nomination did not convert. And parts of the 1980s act, particularly the material on gay people, have aged badly enough that his admirers now skip past them. Murphy's genius is real and narrow: he is one of the most gifted comic performers who has ever lived, and for two decades he mostly declined to do anything difficult with it.

Legacy

The late act has been the graceful one. *Dolemite Is My Name* (2019) drew 97 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes and a Golden Globe nomination; his return to host *SNL* that December, after thirty-five years away and a long estrangement from the show, drew its biggest audience since 2008 and won him a Primetime Emmy. *Coming 2 America* arrived in 2021 and *Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F* in 2024. The Kennedy Center gave him the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2015, the Golden Globes the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2023, and the AFI its Life Achievement Award in 2026. His films have grossed $6.7 billion worldwide. Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence and Russell Brand all name him as a foundational influence — which is the measure that matters most, because it means the thing he did was hard enough that other professionals are still trying to learn it.

Achievements

• Grammy Awards — 2007
• Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture — 2007
• Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role
• Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series — 2020
• Worked as comedian, film actor and screenwriter