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LeVar Burton (b. 1957)

Alias:
Levar Burton
Levardis Robert Martyn Burton Jr.

Birthplace:
Landstuhl, Rhineland Palatinate, Germany

Born:
February 16, 1957

Biography from TheMovieDB

Levardis Robert Martyn Burton Jr. (born February 16, 1957) is an American actor, director, and television host. He played Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994), Kunta Kinte in the ABC miniseries Roots (1977), and was the host of the PBS Kids educational television series Reading Rainbow for 23 years (1983–2006). Burton received 12 Daytime Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award as host and executive producer of Reading Rainbow.  His other roles include Cap Jackson in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), Donald Lang in Dummy (1979), Tommy Price in The Hunter (1980), which earned him an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actor in a Motion Picture, and Martin Luther King Jr. in Ali (2001). Burton received the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album at the 42nd Annual Grammy Awards for his narration of the book The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. In 1990, he was honored for his accomplishments in television with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.  From 2017 until 2024, Burton created and hosted the podcast LeVar Burton Reads, often described as "Reading Rainbow for adults". In October 2024, Burton appeared as the host of the Trivial Pursuit television game show broadcast on The CW network and streaming online.  Description above from the Wikipedia article about LeVar Burton, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

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Additional information:

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Film Performances

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Film Production

Director:
1998  The Tiger Woods Story
1999  Smart House
2003  Blizzard
2008  Reach for Me

Executive Producer:
1998  The Tiger Woods Story
1999  Smart House
2003  Blizzard
2008  Reach for Me
2023  The Right to Read

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TV Performances

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TV Production

Co-Executive Producer:
2016  Roots

Director:
1987  Star Trek: The Next Generation
1993  Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
1995  JAG
1995  Star Trek: Voyager
1998  Charmed
2000  Soul Food
2001  Star Trek: Enterprise
2003  Las Vegas
2005  Miracle's Boys
2012  Perception
2014  NCIS: New Orleans
2014  Scorpion
2016  Roots
2021  NCIS: Hawai'i

Executive Producer:
1983  Reading Rainbow
1987  Star Trek: The Next Generation
1993  Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
1995  JAG
1995  Star Trek: Voyager
1998  Charmed
2000  Soul Food
2001  Star Trek: Enterprise
2003  Las Vegas
2005  Miracle's Boys
2012  Perception
2014  NCIS: New Orleans
2014  Scorpion
2016  Roots
2021  NCIS: Hawai'i

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About the Movie Section

Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).

Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.

Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)

While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:

  • I added "runners up" to Top 10 lists, treating them as ties where applicable and numbering them accordingly at the bottom of each list.
  • Regarding those polls wherein "franchise" movies were submitted as one project until BFI's policy changed to regard them separately, I treated them as ties and renumbered the affected lists accordingly (e.g. the Godfather films).

Regarding profile removals and data corrections:

  • If you would like your profile removed from this site, please contact the source of this data directly, TheMovieDB. My assumption is: once it's gone from their site, it should soon be gone from this site.
  • If you would like to correct movie data on this site, please contact the source of this data directly, TheMovieDB. My assumption is: once it's corrected on their site, it should soon be corrected on this site.
  • For additional corrections and profile removals, please e-mail The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).

Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.

Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.