actor
Personal Information
Born on April 26, 1967, in London, England; married Evan Williams; children: one
Education: Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, London, England.
Career
Actor, singer, composer, 1991-.
Life's Work
In 1997 Marianne Jean-Baptiste became the first black British actor nominated for an Academy Award. Her performance in 1996's Secrets and Lies earned her the nomination for best supporting actress, and though she did not take an Oscar home, her performance in the film by renowned director Mike Leigh brought glowing critical accolades and assured her future success. Jean-Baptiste, however, does not limit her career to acting alone; she is also an accomplished singer and composer.
Jean-Baptiste was relatively unknown even in England when she was named an Oscar contender, partly because Secrets and Lies was one of her first film roles. Until that point, her career as an actress had been spent mainly in the theater. The youngest of the four Jean-Baptiste children, she was born in London on April 26, 1967, and grew up in the city as well. An aptitude for music surfaced at a young age, and she began playing the guitar at the age of eight. As a youngster, she was told that she could pursue any career choice she wished, as long as she excelled. "My parents taught me to place importance on family," Jean-Baptiste told Women's Wear Daily reporter Elizabeth Gladfeller. "Appearances weren't emphasized necessarily, but they did make an impression," she added. For a time, she considered studying for a law degree and becoming a barrister.
Instead Jean-Baptiste became sidetracked by her love of the performing arts. She earned a degree from the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, and began appearing in roles on the stage of London's Royal National Theater; she also was cast in productions in the English cities of Manchester and Yorkshire. For a time Jean-Baptiste was a member of the Cheek by Jowl Company, and once played two roles in one work, both Mariana and Mistress Overdone in Measure for Measure. Other stage credits include Running Dream at the Theater Royal Stratford, and Ave Africa, which Jean-Baptiste both wrote and performed.
Jean-Baptiste's first screen role was in the 1991 Hanif Kureishi film London Kills Me, the story of homeless teens living in London's subway system. In 1993 she appeared back on the London stage in It's a Great Big Shame. The play was written by stage and screen director Mike Leigh--known for his quirky, intense portraits of modern England and its class differences--and collaboration with his cast plays an integral part in Leigh's oeuvre. In the play, Jean-Baptiste played Faith, the sister in a lower-middle-class family in London's East End; the play contrasted the modern-day lives of her family with their apartment's nineteenth-century inhabitants. Her character, wrote Ian Buruma in the New York Review of Books, "clucking with disdain and parroting the language of advertising brochures, was the perfect example of a developed Leigh character."
For her next project with Leigh, Jean-Baptiste was asked to consider this premise: a black woman looks into her adoption records and discovers her birth mother was white. She then seeks her out, and her biological parent is equally astonished. Jean- Baptiste's development of this character into Secrets and Lies's Hortense Cumberbatch centered around the tragicomic possibilities that surface when the lives of a middle-class, educated black woman and a vulgar, chain-smoking factory worker connect. The concept behind Jean-Baptiste's first major screen role was something that had been in the works for some time, she said in an interview with Cinemania Online's Sheila Benson. "Mike Leigh was sort of saying, every year, 'Would she look for her mother?' And I would say, 'No,'" the actress said, referring to her Hortense character. "So he killed her father off, and he asked again. And I said, 'Of course not, because her mum's on her own, it would be even worse.' So he killed her off as well, and said, 'Now, would she look?' And I said, 'All right, now she'd look,'" she continued.
Secrets and Lies's Hortense Cumberbatch is an optometrist and the epitome of the sleek and fashionable young urban European woman. When she begins thinking about having a child of her own after her foster parents pass on, she becomes curious about her real heritage. She tracks down her birth mother--whom she already knows is of a different race--and by telephone arranges to meet with her. Leigh's actors work with just a skeleton of the script, then develop the characters in workshop-type rehearsals. Initially they work one on one with Leigh, and later move to an ensemble format, but Jean-Baptiste and Brenda Blethyn, the actress who played her birth mother, had not met until the day shooting was scheduled for their first scene together outside a London Underground station. Blethyn had noticed Jean-Baptiste's name on the cast list, but did not know she was black--nearly the same experience of her character Cynthia, who in the film receives a telephone call from a well- spoken young woman wishing to meet her. When the two characters met, Blethyn assumed Jean-Baptiste was part of the film crew. "So when Cynthia says there has been some mistake, that was my honest reaction," Blethyn told Time film critic Richard Corliss. "It wasn't acting," she added.
After the initial shock at discovery, the film tracks the unlikely mother-daughter pair as they begin to enrich one another's lives: Jean-Baptiste's Hortense remedies some of the squalor in Cynthia's life, and finds herself part of a highly dysfunctional new family; eventually Cynthia's "secret" that was the source of so many "lies" is revealed. The movie debuted to British audiences in 1995 and the following year in North America, winning laudatory reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. Critics lauded Jean-Baptiste's cool, understatedly elegant portrayal of Hortense, and she herself had selected the clothes that emphasized her character's educated, middle-class status, in dramatic contrast to the loud, working- class chaos of Cynthia's household. "All the actors are so convincing that Secrets and Lies often seems like a documentary," wrote Joseph Cuneen in the National Catholic Reporter.
Secrets and Lies took home the Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival, and the following year Jean-Baptiste was nominated for both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award. "People are talking about the race issue in the film, of which there is none," Jean-Baptiste said in the Cinemania Online interview. "It's about adoption. It's about a mother and a daughter. The bigger issue here is that these people here are related. We do, sort of, judge people by the way they dress or the way they appear. But I don't think we should. Hortense doesn't. She's an optometrist and that isn't a coincidence. It's somebody who looks deep into other people, who has real insights, who helps other people see clearly," she continued.
Jean-Baptiste followed the success of Secrets and Lies with a steady stream of work. She told Essence that "In the States it's much easier to get work once you have an Oscar nomination." Although none of the works she appeared in matched the critical acclaim of Secrets and Lies, Jean-Baptiste has drawn more praise for her individual work. "Superior," Library Journal reviewer Danna Bell-Russel said of Jean-Baptist's portrayal of Stephen Lawrence's mother in The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, a fictionalized account of an actual murder. Although Variety critic panned Women in Film as an "overwritten, patronizing piece of pseudo-feminist flatulence," he praised Jean-Baptiste's performance for being "better than the material." For her work as part of the dramatic ensemble in the television series "Without a Trace," she was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award in 2004. In addition to her acting work, Jean-Baptiste is a talented musician. She wrote and sang four songs on British jazz musician Jason Rebello's 1993 album, Keeping Time, and composed the score for Michael Leigh's 1997 film, Career Girls.
Works
Selected works
Films- London Kills Me, 1991.
- Secrets & Lies, 1996.
- Mr. Jealousy, 1997.
- How to Make the Cruelest Month, 1998.
- Nowhere to Go, 1998.
- The 24 Hour Woman, 1999.
- 28 Days, 2000.
- The Cell, 2000.
- Women in Film, 2001.
- New Year's Day, 2001.
- Spy Game, 2001.
- Don't Explain, 2002.
Television- The Wedding, 1998.
- The Man, 1999.
- The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, 1999.
- Men Only 2001.
- "Without a Trace" (series), 2002.
- Loving You, 2003.
Other- (Contributed) Keeping Time (jazz album), 1993.
- (Wrote musical score) Career Girls (film), 1997.
Further Reading
Periodicals
- America, November 9, 1996, p. 22.
- Entertainment Weekly, October 18, 1996, p. 58; May 2, 1997, p. 68.
- Essence, December 2003, p. 146.
- Jet, March 3, 1997, p. 64.
- Library Journal, September 15, 2002, p. 106.
- Nation, October 7, 1996, p. 34.
- National Catholic Reporter, January 17, 1997, p. 18.
- New York Review of Books, January 13, 1994, pp. 7-11.
- Newsweek, September 30, 1996, p. 74.
- Time, September 30, 1996, p. 66.
- Variety, February 19, 2001, p. 46.
- Vibe, September 1997.
- Women's Wear Daily, August 7, 1997, p. S2.
Other- Additional information for this profile was provided by a Cinemania Online interview with Sheila Benson.
— Carol Brennan and Sara Pendergast
