By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 17, 2006; WE33

Want to know how to tick off Denzel Washington?

Think about it for a second -- because, honestly, why is that something you really feel the need to do?

The guy is a paragon of decency, for goodness sakes, a cat who wears virtue like an exquisite Armani tux, and all he has ever done is love his wife and his God, help a bunch of poor kids and make a slew of fine movies for your viewing pleasure.

But, okay, if you must know, here's the rub: Get him on the phone toward the end of a long day of junket interviews with hack reporters and ask the man, two Oscars in and age 51, what's left for him.

"She says, 'What's left for you now?' " he'll exclaim to some publicist/assistant type in the background. "Life is left! How old are you?"

Uh-oh.

Probably it'll wash right over, though, in a shower of that decency, when you explain that the question didn't come out quite as intended, that what you really wanted to know is what hasn't he done that he'd still like to do and that you were just caught off guard when, after 18 minutes of conversation that felt like a preamble to an introduction, he said he needed to wrap it up.

Denzel Washington is laughing, anyway -- and, Lord, that's a laugh. Deep and easy and authentic. And somehow at odds with the adjectives tossed his way every time his face appears in the spotlight. "Handsome" and "sexy" always show up first, of course, but then come words such as "guarded, "aloof," "deeply private."

And maybe he is. Maybe that's exactly the way Washington, who has taken the opportunity to chat with us about his new high-tech thriller "Deja Vu," which opens Wednesday, should be described. There is, however, one other, slightly uncomfortable possibility: We no longer know what to make of celebrities who refuse to offer us deranged antics to analyze.

Washington doesn't go club-hopping with starlets. He doesn't launch into drunken, anti-Semitic tirades. There aren't any on-set temper tantrums. Glaringly absent: repeated stints in rehab, illegitimate offspring, legal feuds with Beverly Hills neighbors, Internet sex tapes, rumored eating disorders, sordid strip club escapades. And where, oh, where is that reality show needed to illuminate the more mundane dysfunction surely percolating inside "Denzel's House"?

Except maybe the dysfunction doesn't exist. The man doesn't even wade into that most pedestrian source of celebrity gossip fodder -- politics. Asked about the social commentary underlying the plot of "Deja Vu," in which his character tries to stop an Oklahoma City-style bomber using secret government surveillance technology that can see inside any building in the world, Washington concedes that it's an interesting debate. "We say to our government, 'Yes, catch the bad guys, but don't come into our house to do it.' It is tricky, the times that we live in."

But he goes no further.

Question: Did you do a lot of research going into this?

"As much as we could."

Question: Do you have a method to prepare for each role?

"No."

Well, okay then.

Anyway, what is it, really, we want to know about Denzel Washington that he won't tell us? Maybe a few things, but in truth, his story is well-known, and mostly because he has been willing to share it time and time again. That it might not be sensational enough for modern tabloid tastes is a different matter.

Washington has been married for 23 years to the same woman, Pauletta, which isn't doing US Weekly's editors any favors. He's a former Little League coach of a dad to four kids in their teens and early 20s of whom he's so proud, he told Oprah Winfrey a few weeks back, that "my shirt's not big enough for my chest." (His oldest son, John David, was recently recruited to play for the St. Louis Rams after a football career at Morehouse College.) He's an impassioned supporter of the Boys & Girls Clubs, and he's a preacher's son who grew up to be one of the most respected performers of a generation but still follows the "Cagney by Cagney" philosophy of the profession: Acting is a job, and then you go home.

No life is untroubled, of course, but Washington seems to have dispensed with his share of turmoil early on. Growing up in Mount Vernon, N.Y., he split time between his mother's beauty shop, his father's church and the Boys Club. When his parents divorced when he was 14, he began to run the streets a bit, getting into fights and playing at the edges of more serious transgressions. A scholarship and his mother's insistence sent him to a boarding school upstate, and from there a path was blazed to Fordham University and a life lived graciously.

It could have been different, of course, and here's where Washington gets on a roll.

"I remember one of the counselors at the club saying, 'With all your smarts, you can do anything you want to do,' and I walked out of that club like, 'Hey, that's a concept I never thought about: I can do anything I want to do,' " he says. "So, I mean, you never know what influences people, and you never know how you can help turn a person around with a kind word or a piece of advice."

And thus Washington now has a book. Not because he was itching to become an author, but because he's a "How high?" kind of guy when it comes to the Boys & Girls Clubs, which asked him to anchor a book for their benefit. "A Hand to Guide Me" is a collection of essays by such people as Jimmy Carter and Colin Powell remembering the unsung mentors who shaped their early lives.

It was during a Boys Club camp variety show that Washington became enthralled with performance. Ambitions of medicine and journalism were abandoned; he landed the lead in a college play, had a TV movie booked before graduation and has rarely stopped working since. His epitaph, he once said, should read: "Hard work is good enough."

It has been good, and it has been almost continuous. A part on the TV drama "St. Elsewhere" led to acclaimed performances in such movies as 1987's "Cry Freedom," 1992's "Malcolm X" and 1993's "Philadelphia." For his portrayal of an ex-slave in "Glory" (1989), he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The 2001 role of a renegade cop in "Training Day" put him in a two-person club with Sidney Poitier, the only other black man to win a Best Actor Oscar.

What he seeks in projects now, he says, is simply "a good story -- good filmmaker and good story." What he brings to those projects, whether audiences notice or not, is his religion. More than anything, Washington says he is a "God-fearing man -- a man of God, child of God" who thought seriously about becoming a preacher and insists a spiritual message be present in each of his films.

"Not that I'm trying to hit people over the head and say, 'You must convert,' but we all have a spiritual nature and I don't think we should deny that," he says. "We should embrace it."

From another man, a sentence like that might verge on insufferable. The trick to Washington's cool is that he never seems to be posturing for effect. He hasn't been perfect -- he told Barbara Walters that in 1993 when she asked about fidelity -- but what he has said since is "there are only four women in the world: the one you marry, your mother, your daughter and all the rest of them. As long as you keep that perspective, you'll be all right."

So let's just make it clear that we expect there is plenty, plenty left to come from this man. Washington just finished shooting "American Gangster," a crime drama expected to be released next year. He wants to return again to the stage, as he did last year, playing Brutus in a Broadway revival of "Julius Caesar," and in March he'll start directing "The Great Debaters," marking his second turn behind the camera.

And there's another plan for his next 51 years, one we'll let him share in his own words: "Make people better. Lift them up.

"I wouldn't want to go through life saying I didn't help."