Angela Bassett Joins ‘Black Panther’

Angela Bassett

Angela Bassett Joins ‘Black Panther’

Angela Bassett has joined the cast of Marvel’s Black Panther.

Chadwick Boseman

Directed by Ryan Coogler, Chadwick Boseman will star in the title role. Others cast include: Michael B. Jordan, Forest Whitaker, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, Daniel Kaluuya, Winston Duke and Florence Kasumba. Bassett will play Ramonda, mother of T’Challa, aka Black Panther. The film is slated for a Feb. 16, 2018, release.

Angela Bassett

Bassett is best known for her biographical film roles, most notably her performance as Tina Turner in the biopic What’s Love Got to Do with It (1993), for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress and won a corresponding Golden Globe Award. Bassett has additionally portrayed Betty Shabazz in both Malcolm X (1992) and Panther (1995), Katherine Jackson in The Jacksons: An American Dream (1992), Rosa Parks in The Rosa Parks Story (2002), Voletta Wallace in Notorious (2009) and Coretta Scott King in Betty and Coretta (2013). Bassett’s performance as Parks was honored with her first Primetime Emmy Award nomination.

Bassett began her film career in the mid-1980s after graduating from Yale University and its drama school. She did not find any stability in the industry until the 1990s, at which point she appeared in films nearly every year. The 2000s saw a succession of films starring Bassett, with her appearing in at least one film every single year.  In 2013, she had a recurring role on the FX horror series American Horror Story: Coven, earning her second Primetime Emmy Award nomination for her performance as Voodoo queen Marie Laveau. She returned for Freak Show, the anthology series’ fourth season, portraying a three-breasted woman named Desiree Dupree for which she received another nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie. In 2015, Bassett returned for the fifth season American Horror Story: Hotel portraying Ramona Royale, a famous movie star. In 2016, Bassett returned to the series’s sixth cycle, American Horror Story: Roanoke, portraying an alcoholic actress named Monet Tumusiime, who plays struggling mother and former police officer Lee Harris in the My Roanoke Nightmare documentary.

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