actress
Personal Information
Born October 30, 1970, in Brooklyn, NY; daughter of Talita Long (a printmaker and teacher).
Education: Attended Santa Monica City College, Santa Monica, CA.
Career
Actress. Landed first film role in Boyz N The Hood, 1991; appeared in The BRAT Patrol; had featured role on The Guiding Light, 1992-94; had role in Made in America, 1993; played Will Smith's girlfriend on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, 1994-95; played female lead in Love Jones, 1997.
Life's Work
Displaying a sexuality and diversity that has allowed her to play characters ranging from girls who grew up in poverty-stricken urban areas to up-and-coming yuppies, Nia Long made her mark as an actress at age 21 with her first role in the feature film, Boyz N the Hood. Since that time she has received favorable reviews for both humorous and dramatic roles on the big screen and on television .
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Long moved at age four to the Midwest when her mother, Talita Long, entered a master's program in printmaking at the University of Iowa. While living there she got an early education in the significance of being black, especially since she was the only black child in her school. As she recalled in People, "...one day this boy pushed me off my bike and called me nigger. It was the first time I knew I was different." After the incident, Long's mother contacted the police and made her go over to the home of the attacker. This experience and other tough-love measures dished out by her mother made Long a hard-edged kid who refused to accept any abuse from her peers.
A few years after moving to Iowa, Long was uprooted to South Central Los Angeles because her mother wanted to be with a boyfriend who had moved there. Her mother supported the family by driving a city bus, selling beer at the Los Angeles Coliseum, and teaching art part-time in a local school and at a prison. She also urged her daughter from junior high school on to pursue acting. The journey to adulthood was not a smooth one, however. Before graduating from Westchester High School in Los Angeles in 1989, Nia Long was often involved with a tough crowd. "My first boyfriend was into crack, and some deal went bad, and he got killed," she admitted to People.
After attending Santa Monica City College for two years, Long quit her studies to give her full attention to acting. Success came quickly, as she landed a role in John Singleton's highly praised Boyz N The Hood, which was filmed near her own neighborhood. Long could easily relate to the story, which dealt with high school kids growing up in the tough neighborhoods of Los Angeles where gangs ruled the streets and violence was a constant threat. In the film she portrayed the girlfriend of a boy who is trying desperately to get a clean break from gang life.
From there Long made an unusual transition, from the big screen to the grind of a television soap opera. Returning to New York City, she got the role of character Kathryn Speakes on CBS-TV's The Guiding Light and stayed with the series for three years. Long became highly regarded among soap opera stars, receiving an Image Award nomination for her performance in the series in 1993. (Image Awards are bestowed each year on black performers who have made outstanding contributions to their craft.) During this period Long also was reunited with her father, a poet and English teacher who was living in Trenton, New Jersey, at the time.
While her role on The Guiding Light helped her nurture her acting talent, Long was sometimes critical of how the program dealt with blacks. "Most of the shows that have Black people have Black story lines," she told Essence. "Why can't we just have story lines, period? It's like a lot of the people who work on these shows think it's the 1950's or something. The producers shouldn't put so much emphasis on our being Black unless they're going to get it right. We have cultural differences and they don't show those. A lot of the time I have to rewrite my lines because the writers have my character sounding so corny."
After her stint on The Guiding Light, Long returned to the West Coast in hopes of landing more film roles. She faced a grueling five weeks of auditioning for a role she eventually landed 1993's Made in America. This role demonstrated that Long could also do comedy, and it paid off thanks to Will Smith being one of the co- stars. Smith was then the star of NBC's The Fresh Prince of Bel- Air, and he was so impressed with Long's talent that he chose her to play the role of his girlfriend on the series during the 1994-95 season.
Long really came into her own in 1997, when she made a splash in two films that demonstrated the range of her talent. In Soul Food she played the daughter of a matriarch whose family gathered every Sunday for a massive feast in her Chicago home. Her big breakthrough was in that year's Love Jones, in a role that director/writer Theodore Witcher gave to her upon meeting the actress, without an audition. Love Jones dealt with the topsy-turvy romance of two Chicagoans, a photographer (Long) and a poet (Larenz Tate). Rare in its portrayal of black characters in an educated, middle-class context, Love Jones won the Audience Award at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival. It received many favorable reviews, especially for the pairing of Long and Tate. "When we put Nia and Larenz together for a test, the chemistry between them jumped off the screen," remarked the writer/director Witcher in Essence. "The best reason to see the movie is the hot-blooded chemistry between Tate and Long," noted Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly. Long's role also earned her another nomination for an Image Award.
Long was especially proud of being a part of Love Jones. "I want the younger audience to get the message that it's okay to fall in love," she told Essence about the film. "We've lost that sense of vulnerability, that sense of romance." Still in her twenties, Long has clearly demonstrated her own ability to convey believable romance as an actress, as well as hard-edged drama and comedy.
Awards
Received two Image Award nominations, 1993, 1997.
Works
Selected Films
- Boyz N The Hood, 1991.
- Made in America, 1993.
- Friday, 1995.
- Soul Food, 1997.
- Love Jones, 1997.
Selected Television Series- The Guiding Light, 1992-94.
- The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, 1994-95.
Further Reading
- Ebony, July 1997, p. 124.
- Ebony Man, December 1993, p. 52.
- Entertainment Weekly, March 14, 1997, p. 59; September 5, 1997, p. 80.
- Essence, August 1992, p. 70; February 1997, p. 48.
- Jet, September 29, 1997, p. 58.
- New York Times, March 14, 1997, p. C14.
- People Weekly, March 31, 1997, p. 95; October 6, 1997, p. 28.
- TV Guide, April 22, 1995, p. 44.
— Ed Decker
