Actress Angela Bassett turns 53 today and she looks fabulous!
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/I). She delivered the only three-dimensional performance in the 1992 ABC miniseries about The Jackson Five and their family, The Jacksons: An American Dream (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 HBO’s Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (1999) (TV). Her first and only Emmy nomination to date was for her lead role in The Rosa Parks Story (2002) (TV).
Her most current role is Dr. Cate Banfield on E.R.
