Angela Bassett has cool Yale technique and loves to play struggling women. How has her success changed the way we look at black actresses?
When “Black Panther” premièred, in 2018, skeptics wondered whether a film starring a nearly all-Black cast could succeed on the scale of other Marvel movies. It did, and so has its sequel. “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” which arrived in theatres less than a month ago, is already among the highest-grossing films of the year.
Angela Bassett, who stars in the “Black Panther” movies as a powerful queen, has been here before. In 1996, the New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als profiled Bassett shortly after another of her underestimated movies, “Waiting to Exhale,” became one of the biggest hits of the holiday season.
Bassett, Als observed, “is an anomaly in an industry that for the past hundred years has been persistent in its construction of the black girl as Something Freaky or Something Else.”
The article traces Bassett’s ascent from her childhood, in a Florida housing project, to the Yale School of Drama, and through her roles in “Boyz N the Hood” and, in an Oscar-nominated turn, as Tina Turner in “What’s Love Got to Do with It.”
That level of achievement, Als writes, stems partly from Bassett’s delivery of a Blackness “palatable” to white audiences; the piece examines her stardom in the context of predecessors including Hattie McDaniel, Dorothy Dandridge, Diana Ross, and Whoopi Goldberg.
As Bassett navigates that history, and the biases of Hollywood and moviegoers, she “redefines,” Als writes, “what a black diva is.”
https://link.newyorker.com/view/61cdb0d7d9a4382cdb36bb4dhrthq.1ef7g/32e9ea52
What do black women want? And what does Hollywood want black women to be? To both questions, Angela Bassett is a potential answer. So far, the thirty-seven-year-old actress has portrayed Malcolm X’s embattled but noble wife, Betty Shabazz, in Spike Lee’s “X.” She has impersonated Michael Jackson’s long-suffering but noble and religious mother, Katherine, in the television series “The Jacksons: An American Dream.” She has also been nominated for an Oscar, for her portrayal of Ike Turner’s battered but indomitable and noble wife, Tina, in Brian Gibson’s “What’s Love Got to Do with It.”
And, in recent months, she has been seen as the embittered but noble and stylish Bernadine in the film version of the novelist Terry McMillan’s “Waiting to Exhale”—a film that, despite its questionable artistic merit, was Twentieth Century Fox’s most successful Christmas release, not least because of the emotional identification that black women across the country felt for “Exhale” ’s four long-suffering, religious, and stylish black female characters.
“Those sisters who loved the movie gave ‘Exhale’ parties,” says the actress Loretta Devine, who, as the overweight, religious, and pleasure-seeking Gloria Johnson, achieves what is arguably the film’s finest performance. “They rented out theatres in small towns. They grab me on the street. But when I go to see casting people out in L.A. it’s like they never saw the film—like they can’t face the fact that the story of four black girls did well.”
This is not entirely the case when casting agents and directors focus on Bassett. While she has yet to account for a film’s financial success, her dignified, alert, and earnestly emotive screen presence does generate audience sympathy.
And she appeals especially to that segment of the moviegoing public (black women, white housewives, lesbians, and married men) who are not just fetishizing her striking upper-body musculature but are responding to the subtext of her performances—a subtext that includes her struggle to reinvent Hollywood’s view of black women as something other than wisecracking or doleful martyrs, their hair stiff with brilliantine and the funk of subjugation.
“Those sisters who loved the movie gave ‘Exhale’ parties,” says the actress Loretta Devine, who, as the overweight, religious, and pleasure-seeking Gloria Johnson, achieves what is arguably the film’s finest performance. “They rented out theatres in small towns. They grab me on the street. But when I go to see casting people out in L.A. it’s like they never saw the film—like they can’t face the fact that the story of four black girls did well.”
Ukuthula/UBUNTU
fri dec 2 2022 REmbr… G is, as G can only BE. GOOD
aché
ponder on this 