Veteran actor Samuel L. Jackson and his wife LaTanya are still going strong after 44 years of marriage. In a recent interview with AARP, the Coach Carter star touched on how he and LaTanya have kept their 44-year marriage going.
Jackson, 75, was a student at Morehouse College when he met LaTanya, who was also a student at Spelman College, in 1970. The pair tied the knot a decade later and share a daughter, Zoe Jackson.
“A lot of tolerance, because everybody’s got flaws, and not giving up when it would be easy to give up,” Jackson said when he was asked about their marriage. “I’ve done s— in my marriage that’s crazy, you know? She has, too, in her head, or whatever in reality, but you got to go, ‘Is that a breakup offense?’’
The Captain America star also touched on how he and LaTanya, 74, are able to compromise on certain things. “Or is it just that we need to spend a little time together and get some understanding about it?” he said.
“Or there are certain things that you learn to ignore about people — that she’s learned to ignore about me. And one of the things she had to accept is that I’m going to go to work. I’m going to go to work all the time until, you know, it’s time.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Jackson was asked about how he was conferred Gabonese citizenship. “When we were doing the documentary Enslaved about the ships that didn’t make it, my genetic ancestry came back as being Gabonese, and then my tribal destination came up,” he recalled.
“I went back to Gabon, and they had a whole initiation ceremony into the tribe, and they gave me a passport.”
Asked how that feeling was, Jackson described it as “moving.” “I guess you don’t know what survivor’s remorse is until you’re standing where the slave ships had been sitting in the ocean just looking at the horizon,” he explained.
“But it was crazy, too, because I met the chief of the Benga tribe, and he looked just like my best friend from New York. I looked down and I saw girls that I’d had relationships with from high school or wherever, and I saw me in different places. So it’s a deep thing to find out that you belong somewhere.”
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