The Esteemed Black Actresses Who Finally Have The Spotlight

    IN 2002, WHEN Halle Berry became the first black woman to win a best actress Academy Award for her role as the forever-yearning widow Leticia Musgrove in “Monster’s Ball,” she wept as she accepted her golden statue. Many black Americans immediately identified with that well of emotion, which reflected both the toll of her journey and the hope for more change to come.

    But Hollywood has always been a mercurial experiment, with white men holding the reins of power, making progress, inclusion and diversity at best a seasonal proposition. Almost 20 years on, Berry remains the only African-American woman to win a best actress Oscar. And yet there is an increasing sense that it is the Academy that is behind the times. We are living in an age in which some of our greatest, most successful actors are black women, near 50 or older, veterans who have fought against an industry that for much of its history would have rather ignored them. Some of them, like Taraji P. Henson and Berry, began with bit parts on TV. Others, like Viola Davis, who got her start in the theater, or Mary J. Blige, who had almost 10 years of hit singles to her name before being cast in her first film role, came to cinema later in their careers. Many of these actresses were first reliable character actors or supporting players in the 1980s and ’90s, during a shift in what studios deemed bankable, a time that saw a spate of films targeted to black audiences: “Jungle Fever” (1991), Berry’s big-screen debut; “What’s Love Got to Do With It” (1993), with Angela Bassett’s star-making turn as Tina Turner; “Set It Off” (1996), with Kimberly Eliseas a bank robber; and “Eve’s Bayou” (1997), with Lynn Whitfield as the matriarch of an upper-middle-class Southern family. This was a kind of golden era, allowing this generation of black American actresses — women who also include Alfre WoodardRegina King and Queen Latifah — to showcase their depth on a scale previously unimaginable.

     

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/13/t-magazine/black-actresses-bassett-berry-blige-henson-whitfield-elise.html

     

     

     

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