I wanted to do something heroic if I was going to be on TV. And the first thing that appeals to me once I have decided I don't want to be the bad guy is to find things that are not black and white.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I could easily have decided that life was cruel, that being black meant everything was stacked against me.
In television, to be a hero and look like I look, that really stuck with me.
Right now, my job is that I'm like an ambulance chaser. I've got to look for movies with white guys falling out of them.
I was always told that I'd have to do a movie with a white guy in order to get the money. That's the way it was. That made me feel that I should have chosen some other profession, so I could have gotten my just deserts.
I know what's good for me. I can't play black or gray. I can't be a villain or anything close to one. I have to play white.
As a child, I was always drawn to heroic characters. I decided I wanted to act when I realised that Superman and all those gangsters and Indians were just real people in costume.
I grew up watching old black and white movies where Marlene Dietrich or Jean Harlow would go walking down some cobblestone street in ripped stockings and head into some smoky boite and sing for a pathetic living. That's so what I wanted to be.
I decided, if I'm going to be poor and black and all, the least thing I'm going to do is to try and find out who I am. I created everything about me.
I don't like to see projects that are all black or all white. It's how life is. I do like to make sure that I do a nice black family film; that's like keeping my home base. I do other things, but I like to always come back to a positive family film, because of all the negative influences today.
As a little girl, my destiny was stamped onto the canvas of my imagination at 5 years old. I was watching soaps with my grandmother... The most gorgeous black women I had ever seen in my life came out, and I knew that that is what I wanted to do - be fabulous and black and on TV.