Heavenly Angela
By Sue Cameron
Photographed by Isabel Snyder

WHEN ANGELA BASSETT was a little girl growing up in St. Petersburg, Florida, she'd spend evenings with her mom and her sister, taking turns performing for one another using a hairbrush for a microphone. By the time she was 15, her favorite piece to perform was the poem Final Call by Langston Hughes. " 'Send for me, honey, send for me,'" she recites from the poem. " 'I'm the one who will get it done.' I had that thing memorized, and boy, did I do it!" One look at that fabulous face of hers, with its flashing eyes and sky-high cheekbones, reveals a depth of determination that virtually guaranteed success. "For years and years my mom said, 'You're goin' to college, you're goin' to college.' I just started thinkin', I'm goin' to college, I'm goin' to college. I knew I was going to go somewhere."

And go she did. Bassett holds a Master's in Fine Arts from Yale. "I went there for seven years," she says in a proud but low-key manner. "By the time I was 16, I wanted to get away from home. I was bursting at the seams with ideas. I knew I was supposed to obey the rules, but I was rebellious. My mother taught me to be independent and make my own way. I was blessed to be part of a school program in Florida called Upward Bound. Through that I had a teacher who made me apply to Yale, Harvard, University of Virginia, University of Florida, and others. I got in everywhere, but I got into Florida first. It was my back-up school and I can remember writing them a thank-you note for accepting me and then having to turn them down. I was shaking when I wrote it. It was quite a time for me. I didn't know anyone who had even applied to Yale. It was like I had won the lottery. My mother was just jumping up and down and kicking her feet and yelling."

We are sitting in the living room of a ninth-floor corner suite at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel overlooking Beverly Hills, our feet propped on the coffee table, as Bassett provides a condensed version of her professional history. "I did several jobs out of college while I was auditioning. Drama school doesn't teach you how to audition Ñ that's a whole other thing. I'd go in character to the audition and not even know you were supposed to sit and chat first. I guess they wanted to see if I was 'congenial,'" she says, in a mildly mocking tone. "I worked at the Georgette Klinger salon booking appointments in the back room for $25, and I worked for U.S. News and World Report. I really liked that job. I'd go to wire services and get pictures to match the stories they were going to run, and sometimes I had to hop a plane to Washington, D.C., to make the deadline. I cried when I had to give it up." Acting jobs in the theater were coming along regularly for her at this point and she felt safe quitting. "As I was crying at U.S. News I had to say to myself, Hey, you went to drama school to act, didn't you?"

The first really big break came when director John Singleton requested her for his film Boyz N the Hood. ("He didn't even know me at all and he hired me," she marvels.) Next came the John Sayles movie City of Hope, followed by Spike Lee's Malcolm X. But it was her portrayal of Tina Turner in What's Love Got to Do With It that put Bassett on the Hollywood map. Next came performances in Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back, and Bassett had official leading-lady status. "What I love is that young white men, young gay men, and young Hispanic men come up to me and tell me I'm their hero. That's progress. It's people looking at talent. It's not just people looking at their own culture; it's people looking at the culture of America. Having all kinds of people come up to me like that balances out the fact that I'm not asked to play opposite Sean Connery or Michael Douglas or Harrison Ford."

But she was asked to star opposite Meryl Streep, and their movie, Music of the Heart, will be released in December. Streep plays a substitute teacher in Spanish Harlem; Bassett is the school's principal. "I would say the 't' in 'the' just to be in a movie with Meryl Streep. I wanted to please her so much. I was intimidated the first day, and I had all the dialogue to do. She's such an angel. She likes to laugh and joke and really talk. We did a scene where we were having an argument and I really went for it. When we were through she took my hand and squeezed it."

Bassett just returned from South Africa where she filmed Bozeman and Layna, an Athold Fugard play in which she stars opposite Danny Glover. "This was directed by John Barry, an 83-year-old expatriate from the McCarthy era who lives in Paris. He was wonderful. My part was of a woman whose husband just wanders from place to place, dragging her along. He's a very abusive man and he has no control over his life. She's the only one he can control and he abuses her. It's her journey of vulnerability and strength and, like Tina Turner, she eventually stands up for herself."

Bassett's own domestic life is the complete opposite of that scenario. She's been married for two years to actor Courtney B. Vance (The Affair), about whom she predicts, "He's not going to be the best-kept secret in Hollywood much longer. He's doing Clint Eastwood's Space Cowboys right now. He's just incredible." The couple live in the flats of Los Angeles. "I like being where things are. It's convenient. We like to spend our time traveling and reading."

When she first started working regularly as an actress, Bassett had a specific idea of what she wanted from her acting career. "I wanted to work consistently and be paid fairly," she recalls. And she's the one who got it done.