LeVar Burton
- In full:
- Levardis Robert Martyn Burton, Jr.
- Born:
- February 16, 1957, Landstuhl, Rhineland-Palatinate, West Germany (age 68)
What is LeVar Burton best known for?
Where was LeVar Burton born and what was his early life like?
What role did LeVar Burton play in the miniseries Roots?
What was the format of the show Reading Rainbow?
News •
LeVar Burton (born February 16, 1957, Landstuhl, Rhineland-Palatinate, West Germany) is an American actor best known for his long tenure hosting the popular educational TV show Reading Rainbow (1983–2006) and for playing Kunta Kinte in the TV miniseries Roots (1977) and Lieut. Comdr. Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–94) and several Star Trek films. In 2023 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal “for his impact as an actor, a literacy advocate, and a storyteller.”
Early life
Burton was born in West Germany, where his father, Levardis Robert Martyn Burton, was stationed as a photographer with the U.S. Army Signal Corps. His mother, Erma Gene Christian, was a high-school English teacher and later a social worker. The family returned to the United States when LeVar Burton was about two years old, and he grew up mostly in Sacramento, California. His mother made reading a priority for him and his two sisters. As he told Esquire in 2017, “It was expected, insisted upon. In [Erma] Gene’s house, you spoke the King’s English and you read.” At age 13, Burton enrolled in a Roman Catholic seminary, expecting to eventually enter the priesthood. Instead, he fell in love with theater at the seminary and went on to major in drama at the University of Southern California. He was a sophomore in that program when he auditioned for and won his breakout role of Kunta Kinte.
Roots
In Roots, Burton played a young Malinke man living in the village of Jufureh, Gambia, who is violently captured and sold into slavery in the United States in the 18th century. The story follows Kunta Kinte and his descendants’ defiant resolve to hold on to their identity and humanity in the face of brutal treatment. The 12-hour miniseries, which was based on the book Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976) by Alex Haley, was notable for telling the story of slavery almost wholly from the perspective of Black characters and for unflinchingly depicting the Middle Passage, corporal punishment, rape, and other atrocities. Burton, in his first screen role, earned an Emmy Award nomination for best actor in a drama or comedy series.
The 19-year-old Burton was thrust into the spotlight when Roots, which aired on ABC over eight consecutive nights, became a cultural sensation. In a 1977 article, The New York Times described how viewers were responding to the groundbreaking miniseries: “Some cried as Kunta Kinte finally gave in to the whip’s lash and accepted the slave name Toby. And some got angry at the long, deep scars on his back in a later episode.” Years later, in a 2007 NPR interview, Burton reflected on the show’s legacy: “Roots became an education for all of us. Roots is now one of the most used television resources in our nation’s classrooms when it comes to this block of U.S. history….It has served to be a powerful informer, a tool for bringing us all up to speed on the real truth about…what this period in our history means.”
After Roots, Burton appeared in several movies in the late 1970s and early ’80s, including Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), Battered (1978), One in a Million: The Ron LeFlore Story (1978), Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones (1980), The Hunter (1980), and Grambling’s White Tiger (1981).
Reading Rainbow and Star Trek: The Next Generation
In 1983 Burton landed a different kind of role, as host of the new PBS show Reading Rainbow. Each episode featured a children’s book read by a narrator, who over the years included such celebrities as actor James Earl Jones and singer Lou Rawls. Then Burton explored the theme of the book through interviews and visits to different locations. At the end of the show the genial Burton ceded the spotlight to a child to give a book review by saying, “But you don’t have to take my word for it.” Reading Rainbow aired 155 episodes through its finale in 2006, winning 26 Emmy Awards and the Peabody Award (1992), and made Burton a beloved figure to generations of children. “Burton played host, trusted friend and calming presence,” the Los Angeles Times said in 2023. “He was the face of the show and its most visible advocate.”
During Reading Rainbow’s long run Burton continued to work as an actor. From 1987 to 1994 he appeared as Lieut. Comdr. Geordi La Forge on Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek: The Next Generation, a spin-off of the original 1960s series. La Forge, a skilled engineer on the USS Enterprise spaceship who is blind but able to see infrared and ultraviolet light with an assistive device, became a fan favorite. Burton also played the character in several movies in the franchise: Star Trek: Generations (1994), Star Trek: First Contact (1996), Star Trek: Insurrection (1998), and Star Trek: Nemesis (2002). In 2023 Burton appeared in five episodes of the TV show Star Trek: Picard.
“There are times when I experience my life as having been for a specific purpose. I look at Kunta. I look at Geordi. I’ve been able to express humanity as enslaved in the past and as free in the future and do it as a completely liberated Black man.”
—LeVar Burton speaking to The New York Times in 2021
Some of Burton’s other acting projects include Roots: The Gift (1988), in which he revisited the role of Kunta Kinte; Parallel Lives (1994); Ali (2001), in which he played Martin Luther King, Jr.; and The Jensen Project (2010). In 1997 Burton published Aftermath, a dystopian novel about civil war and racial strife in an alternate-reality United States. He also wrote the children’s books The Rhino Who Swallowed a Storm (2014; with author Susan Schaefer Bernardo) and A Kids Book About Imagination (2023).
Jeopardy! guest host and podcasts
After the death of Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek in 2020, Burton was one of many guest hosts of the long-running TV game show. A fan of the show since he was in the third grade, he publicly campaigned to become its permanent host. In 2022, however, Mayim Bialik and Ken Jennings were named cohosts.
From 2017 to 2024 Burton hosted the podcast LeVar Burton Reads, on which he read short stories by such authors as Ray Bradbury, Octavia Butler, and Rebecca Makkai. He returned to children’s programming with the lighthearted fictional mystery podcast Sound Detectives (2023–24), about an effort to solve cases of sounds going missing, such as waves not crashing and crickets not chirping.
Personal life
Burton has been married to Stephanie Cozart Burton, an Emmy-winning makeup artist, since 1992. The couple has a daughter, Mica (born 1994). LeVar Burton has a son, Eian (born 1980), from a previous relationship.