| Bassett has built her career around playing some of the
most celebrated real-life, pioneering black women of the twentieth
century. She was Oscar-nominated and won both the Golden Globe for Best
Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture-Comedy/Musical and the NAACP
Image Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Motion Picture for her
star-making performance as Tina Turner/Anna Mae Bullock in What's Love Got
To Do With It (1993). She won an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding
Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture for her work as the late-Dr. Betty
Shabazz (widow of the slain civil rights pioneer Malcolm X) in Spike Lee's
Malcolm X (1992). She would later play Dr. Shabazz in a cameo appearance
in Mario Van Peebles' Panther (1995). She delivered the only
three-dimensional performance in the 1992 ABC miniseries about The Jackson
Five and their family, Jacksons: An American Dream, The (1992) (TV). In
1999, she played Janet Williams--the principal of the school where Roberta
Guaspari taught in Music of The Heart (1999). She was also in the running
to play Dorothy Dandridge, until Halle Berry beat her to the punch with
the HBO telefilm, "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge". |