Role at National tempts London star Marianne Jean-Baptiste out of LA garden

 
12 June 2013

Oscar-nominated actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste said it was “amazing” to be back on the British stage for the first time in more than a decade — but the London-born star now considers America her home.

Jean-Baptiste, 46, grew up in south-east London but has lived in Los Angeles since becoming the first black Briton to get Academy Award recognition, for 1996 Mike Leigh film Secrets And Lies.

She has returned here for screen work — such as All You Need Is Kill with Tom Cruise, due for release next year — but, for the first time since The Vagina Monologues, has been tempted back to British theatre, by James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner at the National.

Jean-Baptiste plays the lead role of Sister Margaret, the uncompromising pastor of a Harlem church, in a show featuring a gospel choir and band.

She said it had to be something good to get her out of her garden, where she has missed a whole season of planting: “I’ve always been on the look out for challenges. It is such a beautiful, layered piece, a perfect mix of joy and sadness.” Working with director Rufus Norris and the company had been “amazing.”

Yet it would not tempt her to return for good. “My parents came here from the Caribbean for work in the Fifties and to expand their lives. I don’t see that I have done anything different [by going to America],” she said.

In the US she has become a star of CBS drama Without A Trace. Yet in Britain she was left out of a group of actors invited to represent the UK at the 50th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival. She will not be drawn on the situation for black performers in Britain. But she said: “I was offered work in America and it kind of made sense, especially as I was starting a family, to establish myself there. Now my children are at school. And there’s sunshine.”

Her husband Evan Williams and two daughters aged 11 and 15 were at last night’s opening. Family in London are due to see the production and she will meet Mike Leigh next week.

Amen Corner runs until August 14, 020 7452 3000, nationaltheatre.org.uk

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