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All About Samuel L. Jackson's Sweet Family with Wife LaTanya Richardson and Daughter Zoe
The Fight Night actor and his wife have been together for more than five decades after meeting in college and share one child together.
Samuel L. Jackson's career has withstood the test of time — and that may be partially thanks to Samuel L. Jackson's wife and daughter.
The Fight Night actor has appeared in dozens of movies over the past decade, including hits like Pulp Fiction and The Kingsman. And though he's yet to win an Oscar for one of his performances, Samuel L. Jackson has been recognized with an honorary Academy Award for his contributions to the film industry.
And through it all, Samuel L. Jackson has had his wife, LaTanya Richardson, by his side. The couple met while living in Atlanta as college students before going on to date and start a life together.
"50 years ago we started dancing, it was all fun & games. 40 years ago today, s— got real! The slow drag of our lives pressed together, I led sometimes, sometimes she did," he captioned a photo shared to Instagram in 2020. "We finally found that rhythm where there was no leader, we moved as one. We're still glued together, hip to hip, holding each other up, not covering as much of the floor, but owning & loving the space that's ours.
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"You for keeping me on my toes & on the beat for 18,250 days. You make my soul sing‼️Don't change the tune, we're not done dancing," Samuel L. Jackson added.
Here's what to know about Samuel L. Jackson's wife, daughter, and their family life together.
How did Samuel L. Jackson meet his wife?
Their love story begins in Atlanta circa 1968, where both Richardson and Samuel L. Jackson attended college. Richardson studied performance arts at Spelman College, a historically Black and all-female university, while Jackson received his degree at the similarly historic Black, all-male Morehouse College.
During this time, the two actors co-starred in the Morehouse Spelman Players production of The Sale, according to a press release from Spelman College, which has since renamed the performing arts center the LaTanya Richardson Jackson and Samuel L. Jackson Performing Arts Center in their honor.
Looking back, Samuel L. Jackson told People that he remembers his wife as being an "Atlanta city girl."
For her part, Richardson remembers her husband as being a movie buff in his youth.
"Sam was not part of my circle,” she said to The New York Times in 2012. "I was a theater snob; he loved movies."
As for their engagement, the couple has different memories of how the proposal went down, as Samuel L. Jackson explained on The Jennifer Hudson Show. According to Samuel L. Jackson's retelling, she set the date and made the invitations, at which point she told him to "be there."
Richardson, meanwhile, remembers she told him to ask her grandfather for his blessing before her grandfather passed.
"That’s probably what happened, because I was on drugs, and I probably didn’t know what the hell was going on at the time," Samuel L. Jackson said. "So, she’s probably right!”
Samuel L. Jackon credits his wife with helping him on his sobriety journey
The actors' romance hit a bump in the road when Samuel L. Jackson began to struggle with drug abuse in his early career. Richardson told The New York Times that she once came home in 1990 to find him passed out on the floor of their kitchen, at which point she decided enough was enough.
"I threatened to leave him if he didn’t see the rehab through," she said in the 2012 N.Y. Times interview. "I knew I couldn’t leave this boy I admired so much. But I resented him too. I hated it when he slurred his words. A wife hates to see her husband be weak."
Samuel L. Jackson said that he initially feared that becoming sober would diminish certain aspects of his personality. "My worry was, ‘Would I still be fun?’" he explained.
But the actor continued to book roles, going on to star in Quentin Tarantino's iconic film Pulp Fiction and Spike Lee's Jungle Fever. To this day, Samuel L. Jackson credits his wife for helping him achieve such successes.
"She gave me the chance to be the man I was supposed to be," he told People in 2020.
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Who is Samuel L. Jackson's daughter Zoe?
Two years after their marriage in 1980, the couple went on to welcome their daughter, Zoe Jackson, who previously worked as a producer on shows like Project Runway and RuPaul's Drag Race, according to IMDb.
At the time of Zoe Jackson's birth, Richardson was also acting in New York City but told the N.Y. Times in 2012 that she decided to step back from the stage to be a stay-at-home mom — though she would later star in multiple TV shows, movies, and plays. She even directed Samuel L. Jackson in the 2022 Broadway revival of August Wilson's The Piano Lesson.
"In the beginning, we always said the most revolutionary thing that Black people could do was stay together, raise their children with the nucleus of having a father and a mother, since everybody likes to pretend that that's not the dynamic of the African American family. That it's just children out here being raised by women, which we know is false," Richardson told People. "In order to change that narrative, we made a decision to say, 'We are going to stay together no matter what. We'll figure it out.'"
Samuel L. Jackson has noted in previous interviews that he had a difficult childhood, an experience that marked his outlook on parenthood.
"My dad was an absentee dad, so it was always important to me that I was part of my daughter's life, and she deserved two parents, which is part of what informs us staying married for thirty years," he shared with Esquire in 2010.
As part of their promise to be committed parents, Richardson and Samuel L. Jackson take every July off to spend time with Zoe Jackson on a boat, where they can get away from prying eyes. There, the family reconnects and takes a much needed break from work.
But there's a few ground rules for those who accompany them: "Don't wake anybody up. You sleep when you sleep. Then we come together and eat," Samuel L. Jackson revealed to People.
Fight Night premieres Thursday, Sept. 5 on Peacock. New episodes are released weekly.
