American actress Angela Evelyn Bassett was born on August 16, 1958. In addition to being nominated for an Academy Award and seven Primetime Emmy Awards, she has won numerous awards, including three Black Reel Awards, a Golden Globe Award, seven NAACP Image Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. After graduating from Yale University in the 1980s, Bassett started her acting career. Bassett had her breakthrough performance as singer Tina Turner in the biopic What’s Love Got to Do with It (1993), which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. This came after a few small roles, including one as Reva Styles in Boyz n the Hood (1991). She later went on to appear in a number of critically acclaimed and financially rewarding movies, such as Betty Shabazz in Malcolm X (1992) and Panther (1995), Katherine Jackson in The Jacksons: An American Dream (1992), Voletta Wallace in Notorious (2009), Amanda Waller in Green Lantern (2011), and Coretta Scott King in Betty & Coretta (2013).
Bernandine Harris in Waiting to Exhale (1995), Rachel Constantine in Contact (1997), Stella Payne in How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998), Janet Williams in Music of the Heart (1999), Lynne Jacobs in Olympus Has Fallen (2013) and London Has Fallen (2016), and Queen Ramonda in Black Panther (2018), Avengers: Endgame (2019), and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2017) are among her other notable film roles (2022).
Bassett’s portrayal of Rosa Parks in the television film The Rosa Parks Story (2002) earned her a nomination for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Movie. Bassett received a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie for her work on the FX horror anthology series American Horror Story: Coven in 2013. She returned as a series regular for Freak Show’s fourth season, playing Desiree Dupree, for which she received another Primetime Emmy Award nomination. For the fifth season of Hotel, she played Ramona Royale, a famous movie star.
Angela Bassett’s parents: Meet Betty Jane, Daniel Benjamin Bassett
Bassett was born in New York City, the daughter of civil servant Betty Jane (née Gilbert) and preacher’s son Daniel Benjamin Bassett. Bassett received her middle name in honor of her aunt Evelyn. Bassett’s mother became pregnant ten months after she was born and gave birth to Bassett’s sister D’nette. Bassett stated that the pregnancy “only made things worse,” prompting her parents to send her to Golden, her father’s sister, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Despite the fact that her aunt did not have any children of her own, she “loved children and was good with them.”
Bassett was picked up by her mother at the age of four after her parents divorced, and she moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, with her sister. Bassett hadn’t seen her father in years until she went to her grandmother’s funeral. Bassett met her father’s first marriage daughter, Jean, who was several years older than Bassett at the time. She was bused out of her neighborhood after graduating from Jordan Park Elementary School to Disston Middle School for seventh grade. Her first year of attendance was in 1970, one year before busing was implemented to integrate public schools in St. Petersburg. She was bused to Azalea Middle School for an eighth and ninth grade after finishing seventh grade. Bassett’s mother became more involved in her daughter’s academics and informed her and her sister that the pair would be attending college.
