SHE’S stepped into the shoes of many iconic women, from Tina Turner and Malcolm X’s widow, Betty Shabazz, to Coretta Scott King, wife of Martin Luther King Jnr, and civil rights activist Rosa Parks.
Yet, it’s taken the role of a fictional queen in a made-up world to put Angela Bassett well and truly on the Hollywood award-givers map.
She’s already won a Golden Globe and a Critics’ Choice award this season and now has an Oscar nomination too. And if she’s presented with a little golden statue on Tinseltown’s glitziest night, she’ll make history for being the first actress to win an Oscar for a role in a superhero movie.
Angela – who plays Queen Ramonda, the grieving, fiercely protective regent in Marvel’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever – is delighted. “I’m proud of the work we did with Black Panther and now Wakanda Forever,” she said when she accepted her Critics’ Choice award. “My prayer is that the door will remain open and the sky is the limit for other black creators and storytellers to join us.”
The door may be open for Angela now, but Hollywood has been painfully slow to capitalise on the 64-year-old’s star power. Even after a string of top-notch performances in the 1990s, including Boyz n the Hood, Malcolm X and What’s Love Got to Do with It – which earned her a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination – the offers were slow in coming.
“When white actors win and are nominated for major awards, they are usually flooded with offers for roles,” Variety magazine commented. But for Angela, the work all but dried up.
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