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The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has announced that Eddie Murphy will be presented with the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 80th annual Golden Globes ceremony.
First awarded to its namesake by the HFPA in 1952, the special trophy highlights a star’s “extraordinary achievements in the motion picture industry.”
Previous winners include Morgan Freeman, Tom Hanks, Oprah Winfrey and Jane Fonda.
The Golden Globes are returning to TV after being sidelined last year due to racism allegations within the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a group of international journalists who choose nominees and decide winners.
The 2022 ceremony was held as a private event in January following a 2021 Los Angeles Times report that found the HFPA had no Black members. Amid the controversy, the HFPA promised “transformational change” and vowed to boost minority membership and representation as well as to have more transparency.
The HFPA added 103 non-member voters to its ranks in September, which now totals 200. The organization said its voting body, which currently represents 62 countries around the world, is 52% female and 51.5% racially and ethnically diverse.
According to Britannica, Murphy began doing stand-up comedy in New York City as a teenager and was only 19 years old when he joined the cast of Saturday Night Live in 1980.
He quickly emerged as the show’s top performer, creating memorable characters such as Mister Robinson (a spoof on the children’s show host Mister Rogers), convict-poet Tyrone Green, and a very grumpy take on the animated clay character Gumby. Murphy scored a major hit in his first film, 48 Hrs. (1982).
He followed with three more box-office successes—Trading Places (1983), Beverly Hills Cop (1984), and The Golden Child (1986). He left Saturday Night Live in 1984 to focus on his film and stand-up career. In addition to sequels to 48 Hrs. and Beverly Hills Cop, Murphy showed his versatility in Eddie Murphy Raw (1987), which documented two of his live performances, and the comedy Coming to America (1988), in which he played four different roles.
He recorded several comedy albums during the 1980s and also scored a minor pop music hit with the single “Party All the Time” in 1985. He later wrote, directed, and starred in Harlem Nights (1989).
In the biopic Dolemite Is My Name (2019), he played comedian and actor Rudy Ray Moore, who was a blaxploitation star in the 1970s. After an absence of 35 years, Murphy returned to Saturday Night Live in 2019, and, for his performance as the host, he earned an Emmy Award (2020) for guest actor in a comedy series.
He later starred in the sequel (2021) to Coming to America. In 2015 Murphy received the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
Murphy has continued to create not only sequels like Coming 2 America (2021) but he will also star alongside Jonah Hill in the upcoming Netflix film, You People.
The Golden Globes award show will be hosted by Emmy-winning comedian Jerrod Carmichael.
The star-studded event will take place January 10 beginning at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT, airing live on NBC and streaming live on Peacock.