Angela Bassett is riding a horse through a Cuban restaurant in Los Angeles, facing backwards on the saddle. Actually, I should rephrase that: she is pretending to ride a horse through a Cuban restaurant in Los Angeles, facing backwards on the saddle — which, to be honest, makes it only slightly less disconcerting. Her simulated rodeo performance, complete with vocal sound effects and prop (a high-backed chair), is her response to a relatively innocuous question about how she first met the Matrix star Laurence Fishburne — who in 1993 played Ike Turner to her Oscar-nominated Tina, and who once again co-stars with Bassett in the unlikely spelling-contest drama Akeelah and the Bee.
A waiter looks on in bafflement as Bassett continues to re-enact a scene two decades ago from the set of Dessa Rose (a never-released movie adaptation of the novel), in which she was introduced to the man everyone now knows as Morpheous.
“It was a period piece, so we had to ride horses,” recalls Bassett, who yesterday turned 48 in spite of convincing evidence to the contrary. “Now I’m a Florida girl, and Laurence is a Brooklyn guy: neither of us had been on too many horses. So I was sitting on the horse in front of Laurence, and I said to him: ‘You ride the horse, I’ll just get behind you and hold on’. So I tried to manoeuvre myself around him (Bassett is now backwards on her chair, demonstrating) and the horse got very upset by all of this, so he bucked . . .” Bassett makes a falling-off-a-horse noise (there is such a thing). “I just closed my eyes because I knew that was the end, that I would get trampled by a hoof,” she says. Fortunately, Fishburne managed to steer the beast away, and by the time Bassett dared to look up, the actor was holding on for dear life as the horse bolted. From then on, they were friends. Bassett concludes: “He’s strong, but not afraid. He’ll wear a scarf in a minute, and yet he’s a type-A male.”
In Akeelah, Fishburne is definitely in scarf-mode. He plays a grumpy English professor who ends up mentoring an 11-year-old girl from the ghetto, Akeelah Anderson, into becoming a national spelling champion. Akeelah’s mother (played by Bassett) disapproves of her daughter’s participation in the slightly freakish spelling tournaments (rightly, in my mind), because homework is more important. The subject matter poses something of a problem for a UK audience, because spelling contests, known as “spelling bees”, are a very American phenomenon. They were captured brilliantly in the 2002 documentary Spellbound, which was presumably the inspiration for this film.
The writer and director of Akeelah and the Bee, a newbie called Doug Atchison, does a fine job of putting some visual flair into a very non- visual sport (in what was probably not intended to be a gratuitous racial stereotype, Akeelah can spell only by keeping rhythm, and so learns her words while skipping on a rope), but ultimately its down-to-earth humour is slightly ruined by its Oprah-style emotional manipulation.
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Also, as Bassett herself probably knows all too well (she has a pair of four-month-old twins, Bronwyn Golden and Slater Josiah, born to a surrogate mother) spelling bees are surely the last thing any sane parent would want their children to compete in.
Bassett, who looks only vaguely motherly in funky orange plastic-framed glasses, jeans and a billowing floral top, concedes as much: “In the culture of spelling bees, you have these babies, these innocents, and they’re thrown into this competition, this cut-throat environment. The pressure, the lights, every eye is upon them. They spend hours and hours, days and days, cramming this stuff into their heads. It’s so intense, it’s kind of like a sports event. It doesn’t look like fun.”
Bassett, born in New York but raised in St Petersburg (“Wrinkle City”), Florida, was more of a public-speaking geek than a spelling geek. And in spite of being the wrong colour, and from the wrong part of Florida, she won a scholarship place at Yale University, where she earned a BA and a masters.
Bassett’s father showed little interest in raising a family, and the actress didn’t know him until she went to college, near his New York home. “It was a very interesting human dynamic,” she says of meeting her dad for the first time as an adult. Unsurprisingly, Bassett now has strong views on parenting (she is married to the Law & Order actor Courtney B. Vance). “The way I grew up, we always put a handle on the adult’s name, like Sir or Ma’am,” she explains. “A lot of the places we’re going now, they’re calling their teachers by their first name — but familiarity breeds contempt. Yeah, I’m old fashioned. I’ve got a lot of respect for authority.”
Not all authority, however. Bassett has played the civil rights activist Rosa Parks, as well as Tina Turner, Dr Betty Shabazz (wife of the Black Nationalist leader Malcolm X) and Katherine Jackson (mother of Michael). Bassett says she enjoys playing “ordinary people who do extraordinary things” and that she remains most proud of her role in What’s Love Got To Do With It?, the Turner biopic. “It was the most difficult assignment, it took the most out of me,” she says, adding that she doesn’t feel stuck behind the Golden Globe winning role. “If you ask Laurence (Fishburne), he’ll probably give you a different answer,” she says. “The audience was more attracted to my character.” The last time Bassett saw Tina was at a luxury weekend getaway at the home of Oprah Winfrey.
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If there is one controversy that lingers over Bassett’s career, it is her decision to turn down the female lead in Monster’s Ball for which Halle Berry went on to win an Oscar — becoming the first black woman named Best Actress. Berry, who performed an explicit sex scene with Billy Bob Thornton in the movie, thanked Bassett in her speech.
Bassett’s objection to the movie was summed up by one columnist as this: “Imagine the seething indignation that a Jewish man might feel while watching a story in which the widow of a Nazi concentration camp victim has an intimate relationship with the SS officer that shoved her husband into one of those ovens at Auschwitz!” Today, Bassett says she stands by her decision, in spite of the damage it caused to her relationship with Berry (“She was hurt, but not only did it hurt her, it hurt me. We talked it through.”) Bassett explains: “There are issues that I can’t reconcile myself with as an actress. As a black woman growing up in a country that has had a long history of racism, I’m sensitive to all the portrayals of us.”
For now, Bassett has no Berry-topping lead roles to disclose, although she may travel to London and New York with her stage play, August Wilson’s Fences (in which she stars again with Fishburne). And she’s certainly not going to accept any scripts just for the sake of attention. “I feel I was born to be an actor,” she declares. “I don’t just show up and do it. It has to be a chemical reaction.”