The BBC guy took it all very seriously and he asked a number of questions all at once, but he didn’t proffer some kind of renumeration, so I was done. I was just a kid when I saw the boiling bones and I was sure my cousin had lost her mind. She just had to boil it first … in the kitchen to string together its bones. It was my cousin Sheryll who looked very much like Meghan and who had an anatomy class assignment of reconstructing the bones of a dead cat.
#ROGER GUENVEUR SMITH LIPSTICK ALLEY PLUS#
Plus it wasn’t Meghan who put the cat in the pot. I felt in control, and it was fun, but wrong. “Once when I came over to visit, she had a dead cat in a big pot cooking it.” “Tell me more,” he asked eagerly, and I accommodated him. “Yeah, my second cousin on my mama’s side.”Īnother long pause as the breathing of the reporter sharpened. I could hear the reporter give a little gasp of happiness. “We’re cousins,” I said without hesitation. I felt giddy about how stupidly obvious it was, and how serious the guy was about digging up whatever they considered to be dirt and we, her huge light skinned family, were going to provide that dirt without even tossing in an enticement. Meghan Markle is from Los Angeles, and she’s a light skinned black person, so I assumed they were calling all the light skinned black people in Los Angeles to see if they were related and had some tales to tell about her. It took a moment to realize what was going on. I was surprised that he had found my number and thought it ok to call me to ask if I knew one woman in a city as large as Los Angeles. The interviewer in his crisp British accent wanted to know if I was related to Meghan Markle. I heard a crisp British “hello” from the other end of the line and an introduction of who it was - a reporter for a BBC news program. I figured it had to be a mistake or scam, but I picked it up. He also continued his frequent film roles, with assignments including Shade (2003), God's Waiting List (2006), Confessions of a Call Girl (2006), and Ridley Scott's American Gangster (2007).It was a call from an international number and I have an unlisted number.
Thereafter, Smith continued his theatrical work (albeit very infrequently) with such plays as the 2003 Iceland, a psychological drama about four unrelated characters that debuted in Philadelphia. Unfortunately, the project failed to receive even a limited theatrical release, and premiered instead on the Black Starz cable network. The film preserves the original Smith-authored play, and stars the thespian as Newton Lee augments the film with visual pyrotechnics and interpolates archival footage to give the feature depth and dimension. Newton Story (2001) - a Lee-directed film of Smith's one-man stage show on the life of controversial Black Panther leader Huey P. Their actor-director working relationship culminated in the little-seen (but arguably brilliant) A Huey P. The celebrated director cast Smith in such features as Malcolm X (1992), Get on the Bus (1996), He Got Game (1998), and Summer of Sam (1999), all of which received considerable acclaim.
#ROGER GUENVEUR SMITH LIPSTICK ALLEY PROFESSIONAL#
Meanwhile, Smith remained extremely active in regional theater, both by authoring his own efforts (such as a musical about Christopher Columbus that painted commonly accepted versions of the man's life story as historical revisionism) and by teaching drama to juvenile delinquents.Īs the years passed, Smith's onscreen activity crescendoed he signed for plum roles in such contemporary classics as King of New York (1990), Deep Cover (1992), and Eve's Bayou (1997), and, significantly, extended his professional relationship with Lee to many additional projects.
and Malcolm X in one of Thing's pivotal scenes. He achieved much of his success thanks to repeated collaborations with Lee, who cast him as Yoda in the musical School Daze (1988) and Smiley, the hipster street philosopher in Do the Right Thing (1989) in fact, Lee later noted that Smith was the one who devised the idea for the juxtaposed photographs of Dr. Over the ensuing years, Smith cultivated and sustained a reputation for tackling demanding, challenging, and thought-provoking assignments with immense aplomb. An esteemed African-American playwright and actor whose roles almost invariably contend with the politics and dynamics of race (frequent collaborator Spike Lee once famously described him as a "racial cheerleader"), thespian Roger Guenveur Smith grew up in Berkeley and debuted onscreen in the late '80s.
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