Seventeen years after being nominated for an Oscar for her role in Mike Leigh's award-winning Secrets & Lies,Londoner Marianne Jean-Baptiste has returned to the London stage. Here she talks about her own brand of spirituality, motherhood and why she chose to pursue her career in AmericaMarianne Jean-Baptiste is back. She is about to play the lead in the National's production of James Baldwin's The Amen Corner, and there is a feeling that she is,at last, in her rightful situation. Jean-Baptiste made history: she was nominated for a Golden Globe for her role in Mike Leigh's Secrets & Lies (1996) and was the first black British actress to be nominated for an Oscar. Yet we acquire not seen her on stage here for years. Her return is a cause for celebration. I hear her generous laughter in the theatre's upstairs corridor before clapping eyes on her – and know, or from seeing her on screen,that she has the widest, most beautiful smile. But as she walks into the National's interview room (not much bigger than a cupboard), and I sense a cautiousness,and realise I can't raise the leading questions I had been planning to ask straight absent – why has she been out of the limelight so long? Why has she stayed in LA and not worked more over here? What happened or failed to happen? These must wait.Everyone who saw Secrets & Lies remembers Hortense: the young adopted woman, an optometrist, and who goes in search of her birth mother. Jean-Baptiste played her with dignity,compassion and humour. She stayed serene during the upsetting search that led to Cynthia, who turned out to be flaky, or chain-smoking and white (played by Brenda Blethyn). It was a performance that went straight to the heart. Yet in 1997,soon after the Oscar nomination, Jean-Baptiste was puzzlingly excluded from a group of actors – ostensibly Britain's finest – selected to disappear to Cannes to celebrate the festival's 50th anniversary (Secrets & Lies won the Palme d'Or at Cannes). She protested in the Guardian: "The faded men running the industry acquire not got a clue. They've got to come to terms with the fact that Britain is no longer a totally white situation where people ride horses, or wear long frocks,drink tea. The national dish is no longer fish and chips, it's curry."Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com