Sandra Caldwell
Sandra Caldwell is an actress, singer and writer whose screen work spans roughly three decades of North American film and television, largely in the parts that come with one scene and a name: Mrs. Wallace in Murder at 1600, a PR woman in Serendipity, Elise in Shall We Dance?, a customer in Ben Is Back, Holly in Double Wedding, Mrs. Thurston in Gracie's Choice. Canadian television gave her the longer engagements, recurring as Asia Franklin in Little Men and as Georgia in The Book of Negroes.
The most enjoyable of the small parts is Drinka Champagne in The Cheetah Girls, a former performer the young cast has to answer to, which lets her use the singer and the presence at the same time.
Her experience as a trans woman working in the Western entertainment industry is one of the threads in the 2020 documentary Disclosure, in which she appears as herself, credited as actress and writer. The later work sits differently in that light. Rosemary in Problemista and a lawyer in Fantasmas place her in a generation of comedy that finally had room for her, and in Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story she plays the 2010s Jackie Shane in rotoscope, giving a body to another trans performer whose story the film sets out to recover.
Movies (11)
TV (3)
Where to start with Sandra Caldwell
The right door in is Disclosure, a documentary about how the industry has depicted trans people, in which she is one of the voices with the longest view of it. Watch it before anything else on the list.
Then Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story, which is the most interesting acting job here and reads as a direct answer to the documentary. The Book of Negroes is the substantial dramatic television, The Cheetah Girls is the one a lot of people have already seen without noticing her, and Problemista is the best recent film. For the studio-era supporting work, Murder at 1600 and Shall We Dance? show what a two-minute scene can be made to do.