Beah Richards continues to be a deep inspiration for me. I met Beah when I played her granddaughter in the movie ‘Beloved’. Her portrayal of Baby Suggs is breathtaking. Beah had been stricken with emphysema for a number of years and died in 2000. Her chronic illness didn’t stop her giving a brilliant performance in ABC’s ‘The Practice’, which won her an Emmy only a few days before she died. The actress Lisa Gay Hamilton, also in Beloved, made a beautiful documentary about Beah, called ‘Beah – A Black Woman Speaks’. It was seeing that which gave me a humbling perspective on how far Beah had strived and succeeded, and how much actresses of colour like myself BENEFIT from the path she paved. In my own life I’ve seen the rapid evolution of roles for actors of colour. How then for Beah – struggling to exercise her muscular talent when the roles were so limited, so ineffectual. She still managed to receive an Oscar nomination for her role in ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’ where she played Sidney Poitier’s Mother (Poitier was only a few years younger than Beah..!?) . She made lemons into lemonade. Instead of allowing the climate to defeat her she wrote her own plays and poetry. Beah was a student at Dillard’s University in New Orleans in 1948, twenty years before the Civil Rights Act – she graduated into a world where she couldn’t even vote. Whenever I think that my glass is half empty I think of Beah, whenever I get bummed by there not being enough roles for women of colour I think about Beah – and I feel 2 women, 2 actresses, her and me spanning a century where so so much has been achieved. As she once said “There are a lot of movies out there that I would hate to be paid to do, some real demeaning, real woman-denigrating stuff. It is up to women to change their roles. They are going to have to write the stuff and do it. And they will.”