If you don’t know the name Carmen Ejogo, who could blame you? The industry seems to have gone out of its way to hide her light under a bushel. But she is worth your attention, because I have never seen her be bad in anything. She is that rare thing: a genuinely underrated star.
She’s been around a while, too: appearing in Absolute Beginners with Patsy Kensit in 1986 (she would have been about 13), and her fair share of British films, including the 1998 Avengers remake and Kenneth Brannagh’s Love Labour’s Lost (she also sang on the soundtrack).
Half-Nigerian, half-Scottish, Ejogo is intimidatingly, era-spanningly beautiful, with a smile that swings between calculating and feline, warm and open. But it is her eyes that work the hardest on screen. In the 2012 remake of Sparkle, the musical about a 1960s African American girl group, Ejogo is the emotional focal point throughout. In one scene, following an attack by her partner, she communicates rage, fear, strength and sass in a single, unbroken stare. It is a mystery to me that she was not nominated for every applicable award that year.
This month she’s been similarly overlooked for her role as Coretta Scott King in Selma. The film, inexplicably left off the significant shortlists (see the #OscarsSoWhite tag on Twitter), is a masterpiece, and Ejogo puts in a nuanced performance. The Academy, in keeping with its tradition of not seeing race clearly, recently tagged an Instagram photograph of another black actor with Ejogo’s name. You could get angry, but I hope Ejogo just keeps on trucking. At 41, she has time.
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