Angela Bassett Biography (2)
Bassett recently made a move behind the camera with two high profile television films she executive produced: The Rosa Parks Story and Our America. Her performance in the former earned Bassett an Emmy nomination, while the latter garnered praise for its exploration of the challenges facing inner city youth in Chicago. Her other recent television work includes Showtime's Ruby's Bucket of Blood, which gained her a SAG Award nomination and the 2002 NAACP Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Television Movie or Miniseries. She previously earned NAACP Best Actress honors for Boesman and Lena, in which she starred with Danny Glover.
Basset's credits also include the 1998 screen adaptation of the popular novel How Stella Got Her Groove Back with Whoopi Goldberg and Taye Diggs; Contact with Jodie Foster and Waiting To Exhale directed by Forest Whitaker. She also starred in Supernova, Strange Days, Vampire in Brooklyn, Music of the Heart, Spike Lee's Malcolm X (as Betty Shabazz), Boyz in the Hood, City of Hope, Passion Fish and Innocent Blood.
Born in New York City and raised in St. Petersburg, Florida, Bassett won a scholarship to Yale University where she received her bachelor's degree in Afro- American studies and an MFA from the prestigious Yale School of Drama. Her stage appearances include Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Colored People's Time, Black Girl, Henry IV, Part I, Joe Turner's Come and Gone and, with Alec Baldwin, a 1998 production of Macbeth at New York's Joseph Papp Public Theater.
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