Vanessa Bell Calloway

Vanessa Bell Calloway trained and worked as a dancer first, which is visible in how she uses stillness. Her most quoted credit arrived in 1988: Princess Imani Izzi in Coming to America, the bride selected for a prince who has not been consulted. She returned to the same character for Coming 2 America thirty-three years later, which is a rare thing for a supporting comic role.

What she does better than almost anyone is play the person absorbing the news. In Crimson Tide she is the wife at home; in the Tina Turner biopic What's Love Got to Do with It she is Jackie; in Harriet she plays Rit Ross. These are the parts that hold a film's emotional temperature without being given the speeches, and directors have hired her for them for four decades. Wikipedia counts more than 150 film and television productions and nine NAACP Image Award nominations, which is an unusually high nomination count for a performer who is almost never the lead.

The later work is broader and often funnier. She plays Carol Fisher across Shameless, Jennifer Johns in Dragged Across Concrete, Aunt Dorrie in Lakeview Terrace, and Mama Ruth in One of Them Days, where a younger cast plays around her while she supplies the gravity. She voiced Jamika in the animated Bebe's Kids well before any of that.