This past February I paid tribute to 10 African-Americans actresses (Angela Bassett, Halle Berry, Loretta Devine, Kimberly Elise, Whoopi Goldberg, Pam Grier, Debbi Morgan, CCH Pounder, Jurnee Smollett and Alfre Woodard) who I felt delivered amazing performances on the big screen that for whatever reason weren’t praised as much as they should have been. I followed that tribute piece up with two additional articles – in March and April – where I extolled the merits of 10 unsung, superlative performances by African-American actors (Don Cheadle, Ice Cube, Jamie Foxx, Al Freeman Jr., Danny Glover, Samuel L. Jackson, Derek Luke, Eddie Murphy, Wesley Snipes and Denzel Washington).
Since then, it has been brought to my attention on more than one occasion that in my desire to highlight great, unsung film performances, I inadvertently glossed over some work that needs to be seen and championed. So, as I did back in February, I’ll start with the ladies.
This week, I’ll highlight five unsung big screen performances from African American-actresses, and next week I’ll highlight another five.
Tyra Ferrell in Boyz ‘N The Hood (1991)
Ferrell, a fine character actress who enjoyed an all-too-brief spike in popularity in the early 1990s, was originally set to play Reva Styles, the education-minded, single mother of Tre (played by Cuba Gooding Jr.). Somewhere along the line, Angela Bassett, who was set to play Brenda Baker, the single mother of Ice Cube’s Doughboy and Morris Chestnut’s Ricky, assumed the role of Reva, while Ferrell reluctantly agreed to play Brenda. Both actresses are great in the film, in their respective roles, with Ferrell being particularly memorable as the tough-talking, chain-smoking Brenda, who is oblivious to the damage she’s caused Doughboy, her eldest son, by openly favoring Ricky since they were children. Ferrell makes the most of her killer opening scene where she’s berating a preteen Doughboy for being a good-for-nothing layabout like his father, who clearly is nowhere in the picture. With a cigarette dangling from her mouth, and attitude to spare, Ferrell taps into this woman’s damaged psyche and humanizes what a lesser actor would have turned into a fright show caricature.
Irma P. Hall in A Family Thing (1996)
It doesn’t happen all that often, but every once in awhile, a film and a performance will completely take you by surprise in the best possible sense. I saw A Family Thing in a pre-release double-bill with The Birdcage back in the spring of 1996. Even though The Birdcage went onto become a substantial box office hit, it was the little-seen A Family Thing (which was screened first) that impressed me the most; as did Irma P. Hall’s transcendent performance as Aunt T., the blind, all-knowing aunt of James Earl Jones and Robert Duvall’s characters. Duvall plays a good ’ol boy from rural Arkansas who is told by the only mother he’s ever known on her deathbed that he’s actually the son of a black woman who died in childbirth. He also finds out that he has a black half-brother (Jones) who lives in Chicago. Shell-shocked, he hightails it to the Windy City to track his brother down and is welcomed into the fold by his Aunt T., the sister of his and Jones’ mother, who plays an instrumental role in brokering a relationship between the two. Hall had worked here and there in films prior, but was best known for her award-winning work on the Chicago stage. All those years cutting her teeth on the boards paid off handsomely; anybody who steals the show from the likes of Oscar-winner Duvall (Tender Mercies) and Emmy- and Tony-winner Jones (TV’s “Gabriel’s Fire” and “Heat Wave” and Broadway’s The Great White Hope and Fences) is a force to be reckoned with. Fortunately, Hall didn’t have to wait long to appear in a box office hit. She followed up A Family Thing with her attention-grabbing role as Mama Joe in 1997’s Soul Food, written and directed by George Tillman Jr., a Milwaukee native. Oscar voters overlooked her work here, as did the NAACP Image Awards (a truly embarrassing blunder on both groups parts) but the Chicago Film Critics Association had the good sense to name her 1996’s best supporting actress.
Taraji P. Henson in Talk To Me (2007)
Oscar-nominee Henson (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) first shot into the public eye with her scene-stealing turn as Tyrese Gibson’s long-suffering girlfriend and baby mama in writer-director John Singleton’s Baby Boy (2001), which was the third and final installment in his “hood” trilogy, following 1991’s Boyz ‘N The Hood and 1993’s Poetic Justice. As great as she was in that film and as memorable as she’s been in just about everything that’s followed, even she has pointed out that her role as Vernell Watson, the foxy, bourghetto girlfriend of Ralph “Petey” Greene (Don Cheadle), a real-life ex-con who became a wildly popular and influential radio personality and activist in 1960s and 1970s Washington D.C. in the big screen biopic of his life, Talk To Me, is her personal favorite. In a conversation with Cathy Hughes on her TV One interview show, “TV One On One,” Henson said that of all the roles she’s played, Vernell afforded her the rare opportunity to show her full range as a performer. Plus, it’s one hell of a juicy supporting role, juicier even than her Oscar-nominated role in Benjamin Button. Had the film been promoted by Focus Features better than it was, I can’t help but think that Henson, Cheadle, and Chiwetel Ejiofor, playing the straight-laced program manager of the D.C. radio station Ralph “Petey” Greene worked at, would have all landed Oscar nominations for their amazing performances.
Sanaa Lathan in Love & Basketball (2000)
Speaking of roles that show off an actor’s full range, Lathan certainly found that in Monica Wright, the basketball playing, female protagonist at the heart of writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood’s feature debut, Love & Basketball. Lathan had to audition a ridiculous number of times before she stepped into Monica’s sneakers; the filmmakers were adamant about casting an actress that could convincingly play a basketball player. Monica’s love of basketball has been a sticking point with her traditional-minded, homemaking mother (played by Alfre Woodard) since she was a child. Despite that, tomboy Monica is determined to keep playing and eventually go pro – her dream is to play in the NBA (the film is set well before the formation of the WNBA in 1996). She finds an ally in childhood friend and next door neighbor Quincy (Omar Epps) whose father (Dennis Haysbert) is an ex-NBA player. Their mutual love of the game bonds them, but they go their separate ways while attending college, only to cross paths once out of school and playing professionally (he stateside and she abroad in Europe for a women’s league). Lathan wholly convinces that she has the stuff that makes a hoops star and she anchors the film with a star-making performance that easily ranks among the best you’ll ever likely see.
Queen Latifah in Set It Off (1996)
Believe it or not, Jada Pinkett Smith originally wanted to play Cleo, the trash-talking, über-butch lesbian from South Central Los Angeles who is all-too-happy to suggest that she and her lifelong friends Stony (the role Pinkett Smith would eventually go onto play), Frankie (Vivica A. Fox) and Tisean (Kimberly Elise) start robbing banks as a means to an end: namely to brighten their increasingly bleak lives. The producers thought better, and cast rapper-turned-actor Latifah in the role instead. Up until that point, she was best known for her music and her leading role on the long-running Fox sitcom “Living Single” (1993-1998), which is to say, nothing she’d done prior hinted at the fierce, movie-stealing performance she would deliver. Cleo’s final moments in the film pack quite an emotional wallop. Latifah has stated that she experienced a sort of emotional catharsis while filming that sequence in connection with a personal loss she was still trying to process; her brother had died from injuries he sustained in a motorcycle accident on a bike she had bought him as a gift. Like Hall’s work in Family and Lathan’s work in Basketball, Latifah’s work here is revelatory.
