Angela Bassett
Angela Evelyn Bassett (born August 16, 1958) is an American actress. Known for her work in film and television since the 1980s, she has received various accolades, including two Golden Globe Awards, in addition to nominations for two Academy Awards and eight Primetime Emmy Awards. Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2023,[2] and she was chosen to receive an Academy Honorary Award in 2023.[3]
Angela Bassett
Bassett had her breakthrough portraying singer Tina Turner in the biopic What's Love Got to Do with It (1993), which won her a Golden Globe Award and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She had success starring in Boyz n the Hood (1991), Malcolm X (1992), Waiting to Exhale (1995), Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998), and Music of the Heart (1999). In the following decades, she took on supporting roles in the drama Notorious (2009), and the action films Green Lantern (2011), Olympus Has Fallen (2013), and London Has Fallen (2016). She also played Queen Ramonda in the Marvel Cinematic Universe films Black Panther (2018), Avengers: Endgame (2019), and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022). For the latter, she won another Golden Globe and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
On television, Bassett has starred as Katherine Jackson in the miniseries The Jacksons: An American Dream (1992). Her portrayal of Rosa Parks in the television film The Rosa Parks Story (2002) gained her a nomination for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress. Her performances in two seasons of the FX horror anthology series American Horror Story earned her nominations for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in 2014 and 2015. In 2018, Bassett began producing and starring as an LAPD patrol sergeant in the Fox drama series 9-1-1.
Media image[edit]
Bassett has portrayed real-life African-American women who are usually strong and intelligent. Bassett said in 2001 that she liked those roles and added: "That's the image that I like to put out there, and those are the parts I'm attracted to. But not iron-fist kind of strong, just self-assured. I'm nice too."[39] She has turned down roles which she viewed as demeaning to her image. "This is a career about images. It's celluloid; they last for ever. I'm a black woman from America. My people were slaves in America, and even though we're free on paper and in law, I'm not going to allow you to enslave me on film, in celluloid, for all to see. And to cross the water, to countries where people will never meet people who look like me. So it becomes a bigger thing than me just becoming a movie star, and me just being on TV. So if you're going to show every black woman as 400lb or every black woman as the prostitute on the street ... But I have always maintained that [the roles] I cannot do because of the way I'm made up, or because of the way I think, I don't begrudge that there is someone else who has no issues with that."[125]
In December 2022, she was named as part of The Hollywood Reporter 's Women in Entertainment Power 100.[126] Time named her among its 2023 honorees for Women of the Year.[127]