Edward Regan Murphy was born on April 3, 1961, in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Roosevelt, Long Island. His father Charles Edward Murphy was a transit police officer who was killed by a woman he was seeing when Eddie was eight — a traumatic loss that left Eddie and his brother Charlie to be raised by their mother Lillian and later a encourage mother, Evelyn Lynch. He developed comedy as a coping strategy and as a means of social navigation from early childhood, performing impressions of cartoon characters and television personalities for classmates. He began performing at a comedy club in Baldwin, Long Island, at age fifteen, then at sixteen at the Comic Strip in Manhattan.
Murphy was hired as a featured player on Saturday Night Live in 1980 at age nineteen, initially receiving little screen time. By 1981 he had become the show's dominant performer — his impression of James Brown, his creation of characters like Buckwheat and Gumby, his raw improvisational confidence — while the rest of the cast rotated through, Murphy became the show's center of gravity. His energy and timing were something the show had not had since the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players: the natural comedian who could make anything funny simply by being himself in relation to the material.
Beverly Hills Cop (1984) made Eddie Murphy one of the biggest box office stars of the decade. He had originally been considered for a role in 48 Hours (1982) before being cast, and his combination of street-smart improvisation with mainstream comedic appeal proved to have almost unlimited commercial reach. Trading Places (1983), Coming to America (1988), and the Beverly Hills Cop sequels demonstrated that he could carry films across different genres. He was, for approximately a decade, the most bankable comedy star in Hollywood, with a directness and improvisational authority that made other performers in the same scene seem inhibited by comparison.
Murphy's career went through a significant commercial decline in the 1990s before his rehabilitation as a family film star via the Shrek franchise (beginning 2001), Mulan (1998), and the remake of The Nutty Professor (1996). His return to stand-up comedy — his 2019 Netflix special Eddie Murphy: Delirious Live represented his first stand-up in thirty-five years — demonstrated that the original talent remained entirely intact. His performance in Dolemite Is My Name (2019) earned significant critical praise and an Academy Award nomination was widely discussed but not realized. His 2021 return to Beverly Hills Cop for a streaming sequel confirmed his continued commercial vitality.
