Pics of the Week

Go see Angela in her first wide release animated role as Mildred, the orphanage caretaker, in Meet the Robinsons. In theaters today!

The pics of the week are at the premiere of the movie that Angela and Courtney attended on March 25th at the El Capitan Theatre.

7 Days

‘True love is possible’

At the age of 48 Angela Bassett is pushing back the boundaries for older women in Hollywood in more ways than one. Not only is she still one of the most successful and in-demand actresses in Tinseltown, she also became a first-time mum just three years short of her 50th birthday.

And it’s clear that despite all her film successes - including an Oscar nomination for the Ike and Tina Turner biopic ‘What’s Love Got To Do With it’ - it’s being mum to one-year-olds Bronwyn Golden and Josiah Slater that brings a megawatt smile to her face. “Having the twins has completely changed my priorities,” she says. “Work is still important but there are different priorities at different times in your life and right now mine are for my babies.”

The twins arrived after she and husband actor Courtney B Vance used a surrogate mother. Now the hard-working star says her stellar career revolves around her two little ones. “I’ve been offered lots of lead roles, but I’ll only consider them if they fit in with my time with the children. I just want to be with them,” she reasons. The stunning star also insists that being an older mum has made her feel sexier and more confident than ever.

“There is definitely a confidence that comes in your 40s,” she says. “It’s just not something you have to work so hard at.” Known for her feisty independent roles in hard-hitting dramas such as ‘How Stella Got Her Groove Back’, ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’ and ‘Malcolm X’, Angela admits the twins have not only brought out her softer side off screen, but also in her choice of movie roles.

That’s why she leapt at the chance to appear in the new family animation ‘Meet The Robinsons’. The story follows Lewis, a little boy genius who, in his quest to find the parents he never knew, finds himself travelling into the future and suddenly sharing his life with the mysterious but fun-loving Robinson family who help unleash his powerful potential.

In the movie, which also features Tom Selleck, Angela lends her distinctive voice to the character of Mildred, the patient and kind caretaker at the orphanage that has always been home to Lewis. Playing such an endearing character brought out all her maternal instincts, the actress says.

“I absolutely loved the story,” Angela beams. “And as a new mom I found it especially appealing because it’s about a little boy looking for a family and about the many ways to make family. “Mildred’s ambition, her dream, her occupation and her greatest commitment is to finding each and every one of her orphanage kids a loving family - one who will see them for who they are and love and appreciate their own special uniqueness,” she continues.

“She loves all the kids, but has a special place in her heart for Lewis. She understands how different he is, how he marches to the beat of his own drummer. I think she sees a little Albert Einstein in the making.” Having never done an animated movie before, Angela says she was captivated by the process of bringing Lewis and the Robinson family to life.

“It’s been one of the biggest thrills in my career to lend my voice and see these characters in all their animated glory,” she enthuses. “Mildred has a fantastic look, so endearing and cute with her little eyeglasses and hairdo. I loved it.

To me, it’s amazing what the animators have come up with on this film.”

Angela admits she also liked the fact that working on animation wasn’t as time-consuming as her normal roles. “This was very easy to do,” she explains. “It’s different than working on screen. Those films take forever - years to complete. “So with two young ones at home, I really appreciated a different way of working.”

And though the film is animated, Angela was able to draw on her own experiences of growing to help her relate to orphan boy Lewis. Born in New York, she and her younger sister were raised by their mother Betty, who later divorced their father. The star then spent much of her childhood living with her Auntie Golden in Harlem and, though times were tough, Angela’s mother always stressed the importance of education and following your dreams.

“She instilled in me a sense of independence, so I was always the self-check kid - the one you don’t have to worry about,” Angela says. “But the only thing with that is when you do the slightest thing wrong, you really go off. “That was me and my mom,” she adds with a laugh.

Those difficult early years are a far cry from Angela’s idyllic home life now. The star and her husband of ten years, whom she met at Yale Drama School, are so devoted to one another, they recently wrote a book about their relationship: ‘Friends: A Love Story’. “We just wanted to show that true love is possible and a good old-fashioned love story is one that should be told,” Angela smiles.

“We hope it serves as a guide for other people in their relationships.” Happy in love and at work after finding a new direction in family films, Angela admits she couldn’t be more blessed. And though she has several projects lined up including the new film ‘Toussaint’ with Don Cheadle and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, the actress knows what’s really important in her life, and love has everything to do with it. “Having the children makes you notice all kids and you think how beautiful they are, and dying for affection, and brilliant, and just how important that is.”

PROFILE

Real name: Angela Evelyn Bassett
Birthdate: August 16, 1958
Significant other: Husband of ten years Courtney B Vance
Career high: An Oscar-nominated performance in ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’
Career low: ‘The Jacksons: An American Dream’, the forgettable 1992 Jackson family biopic
Famous for: Her spot-on portrayal of Tina Turner in ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’, even though she had never seen the singer perform
Words of Wisdom: “I really believe that what I do as an actress is my God-given talent. This is my calling. Not my career.”

Angela Bassett on her Animated Self, Mildred

Read the full article here!

It might surprise people who stick around for the credits of "Meet the Robinsons" -- the movie the studio hopes will establish the technological leap that is Disney Digital 3D -- that the voice of Mildred, the frumpy, matronly caretaker at the orphanage, belongs to the anything-but-matronly Angela Bassett, a sophisticated beauty whose figure is the antithesis to Mildred's eggish shape.

"I guess they did give me a pretty big butt," says Bassett, in Detroit last week to talk up "Meet the Robinsons," which opens Friday. "But at least they don't have her stick it out at the audience with the 3D. She does preserve some dignity."


Bassett, the mother of 14-month-old twins with her actor-husband, Detroit native Courtney Vance, did not take the "Robinsons" job because she wanted to make a movie that her children could see -- the motivation for many actors.

"I've done a lot of movies I'll be proud for kids to watch when they're old enough," says Bassett, who won acclaim as singer Tina Turner in "What's Love Got to Do With It"; Betty Shabazz in "Malcolm X" and "Panther"; and civil rights icon Rosa Parks in the TV movie "The Story of Rosa Parks."


Bassett says she took this role for the same reasons she selects all of her movies.

"For one, it was a character I had never played before, which is always important to me, to keep me sharp. But it was also the desire to be part of a well-written movie that has something really positive to say about families and about all the different ways there can be to make a family," says Bassett. Her daughter Bronwyn and son Slater were delivered by a surrogate mother.

Bassett, who saw the finished film just a couple of weeks ago, says she was knocked out by the presentation. "It just transports you, it takes you somewhere brand new," she says.

"But you know, the best part was that after about half an hour, it just became natural to me, and then I concentrated more on the story, and that was what I really loved, the story of this boy who finds a family all his own.


*Angela in the studio with "Meet the Robinsons" director, Stephen Anderson



"At the end, I was really tearing up, and I've done a lot of heavy drama on stage, I'm a real tough customer. At least I thought I was. But here I was crying, and I knew the story, I knew what happened. It didn't matter. It was all brand new."

*Read more about Angela in Meet the Robinsons in another article here!

Angela Meets Mildred

"I'm amazed with how they make you come to life"





Thanks to g6publish.videodome.com , check out a 60 second clip on Angela talking about her experience 'meeting' her character, Mildred.




Click the pictures to watch clip






Whats That Got to Do With it?(Random News!)
View clips of recent Angela Bassett interviews!

• Angie on the Today Show (Looking fab over 40) [source]
• Angie and First Lady Laura Bush for Breast Cancer Awareness [source]
• Angie on Hour of Power, Christian Television [source]
• Angie and Courtney on Praise the Lord [source]
• Angie and Courtney in The Dog House (be prepared, this is a very painful 'interview') [source]

Meet the Robinsons Premiere

Angela and Courtney attended the Meet the Robinsons premiere at the El Capitan Theater on Sunday (without the twins:-()


USA Today reported:
Bassett talked about her twins, Slater and his sister, Bronwyn. They are just 1, a little too young to appreciate the film. But they have started responding to Baby Einstein videos and are starting "to make alphabet noises," she said."



Angie and Court still look like they were having fun. I guess they can have a break every now and then.

Meet the Robinsons Clip

Check out animated Angie in Meet the Robinsons

Chicago Sun Times

Family Matters

Angela Bassett's innate charm and sweetness spills over into 'Robinsons' role


Angela Bassett doesn't walk into a room. She makes an entrance. Evoking all the starlet glamor of Hollywood's Golden Age, Bassett looks like a movie star: beautifully coiffed hair, impeccable makeup, a breezy black-and-white print dress hidden beneath a fingertip-length fur coat. The sparkle in her deep brown eyes is matched by the glare from her bazillion-carat diamond engagement ring. Her smile could melt a glacier.

Bassett settles in for a chat in a sun-kissed room at the Ritz-Carlton, a sumptuous setting for the velvety-voiced 48-year-old actress who, sorry ladies, doesn't look a day over 35.

She's in town promoting her latest film, the Disney animated feature "Meet the Robinsons." The movie (screening in 3D at select theaters) tells the story of 12-year-old Lewis, a sweet and precocious little boy who is raised in an orphanage from birth. Lewis is also a genius, taking college courses and inventing all sorts of gadgets that usually end up exploding. Undaunted, he continues sketching his dream machines until, one day, he invents a "memory scanner" -- a time-replay gizmo he hopes will return him to the rainy night when his mother left him on the doorstep of the orphanage -- run by the kindly Mildred (voiced by Bassett) -- and therefore allow him to re-create the family he has never known.

Bassett beams when she recalls the first time she saw her animated counterpart on the big screen.

"Oh, I thought she was just so sweet and warm, very matronly," Bassett says. "She dressed kind of nice. I loved [her] cute little sweater ensemble."

Animation voiceovers can be a lucrative though somewhat lonely project for actors. In most instances, the actor is alone in a recording booth armed with only those pages of the script that pertain to their character. The lines are out of context, and the actor has no idea who they're speaking to or who is responding to them, except for the film's director, in this case Stephen J. Anderson.

"At first, it really is sort of like being in a vacuum," Bassett says. "You don't know if you're getting it right. So I'd just look at the director and say, 'Was that right? Did you get what you wanted?' With Stephen there, it made my job so much easier. And it was great that halfway through the process I got to meet with the animators. It gave me an opportunity to see what they were doing, and it gave them an opportunity to see me, to see how I moved, my expressions. As much as I was working in an isolated [recording booth] setup, the animators were also isolated in that they had no real idea what I looked like and sounded like. Looking back, I wasn't so much playing off another actor, but rather the animators. And vice versa. That was a unique experience."

What was most special, Bassett says, was the revelation that Anderson was closer to the material than she or anyone knew at first.

"What was really touching and helped me a lot was discovering that [Stephen] was himself adopted at a very young age," she says. "I could only imagine how special a project this film must have been for him. He could tell that story because of his own life experience. He was Lewis. He had been living with those characters in his mind all these years, so he knew exactly where he wanted each of us to go with [our characters]."

Born in New York City, Bassett and her sister, D'nette, were raised by their divorced mother, Betty, who instilled in her daughters the strength and determination to succeed, much like the way Mildred (and various other adult characters in "Robinsons") encourages Lewis to "keep moving forward."

"I was a latchkey kid," Bassett explains. "Our mom was working all the time. So we had a lot of responsibility thrust upon us at an early age to do the right thing. She laid down the law, put the rules down and you followed them. [Laughs] You know, let that foot hit the front porch when the streetlights come on. She constantly told us to listen to our teachers and learn. She held me and my sister to a high standard and, yes, sometimes it seemed so unfair, especially when we saw other kids in the neighborhood getting away with a lot of stuff, and maybe not trying so hard in school. But she was so loving, even in all of that.

"She wanted us to achieve more than she had achieved in life. Having graduated only from high school and not really being pushed academically, college wasn't an option for her. She headed straight to New York to join the work force. So it was really important to her that we got a college education."

Bassett attended Yale, where she received her degree in African-American Studies, then a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Drama.

Her acting career began in earnest in 1985, when she starred in the film "Doubletake," followed a year later by the television series "F/X." Moviegoers first saw her in her Oscar-nominated, Golden Globe-winning performance as Tina Turner in the 1993 film "What's Love Got to Do With It." She also starred as Dr. Betty Shabazz, the widow of the slain Civil Rights leader in "Malcolm X" (1992), as a hugely successful stockbroker who finds romance under the Jamaican sun in "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" (1998) and as a detached mother in last year's "Akeelah and the Bee." Her recent small-screen work includes CIA director Hayden Chase in the now defunct "Alias," and her Emmy-nominated role as Rosa Parks in the made-for-TV film "The Rosa Parks Story."

Yale was not only an educational journey, it also was the place where she met the love of her life, fellow student Courtney B. Vance ("Law and Order: Criminal Intent"), also a graduate of the university's prestigious drama school. Their long, intense courtship resulted in a 1997 marriage. The couple recently wrote a book, Friends: A Love Story ( (Harlequin), he-said/she said autobiographies detailing their their life journeys. Last year they became the parents of twins by a surrogate. Daughter Bronwyn Golden and son Slater Josiah have taught Bassett to look at life in a whole new way.

"I'm sure I'll do and say a lot of the things my mother did," Bassett says, laughing, "no matter how much I always said I never would. Of course, I want to instill in them the work ethic, the love of books and school, but I also have the opportunity to expose them to so much more than I was. I look at them and I just see the little kid in me, in everyone. I think any time you look at a child it makes you see the child in all of us."

Even at the tender age of 1, Bassett's children have taught her one very important thing about herself.

"I have a little patience, [laughs] and I have a lot of patience," she says. "Lord knows I have a whole lotta patience these days."


'I'd want to know who my biological mother was'

The subjects of adoption and searching for one's birth mother may not be the expected stuff of animated features, but director Stephen J. Anderson has turned the topic into a sweet, funny and emotional children's film that reaches out to all kids -- and to all parents, biological or otherwise.

I posed the question to actress Angela Bassett, voice star of the film: If you had been adopted as a child, would you seek out your birth mother?

"Wow, that's a tough question," Bassett said. "Interestingly, my sister adopted a boy and a girl. My nephew never had an interest in seeking out his birth mother. But my niece went looking for her with great determination. She bought books on how to do it, she used the Internet, of course, and she did ultimately find her.

"And it really turned out so beautifully. We spent Thanksgiving with her birth mother and maternal great-grandmother. [Pauses] Just the whole idea of family -- that we're all a family -- is so beautiful and so powerful. My sister is totally OK with all of it.

"Would I? Hmmm. I think I'd be very curious because I'm a curious type of individual. So, yes, I guess I would want to know who my biological mother was. But, you know, I wonder how great that curiosity would be if my adoptive parents were so phenomenal and I was completely satisfied and knew that my birth mother only wanted what was best for me. That she gave me up out of a profound love for me."

In the movie, Lewis (voiced by Daniel Hansen and Jordan Fry) comes to realize just that: His mother didn't give him up because she didn't love him; she gave him up because she did.

"It's a film that goes so deep and yet speaks to children so beautifully," Bassett said. "I hope children will walk away from it believing in themselves, no matter how many obstacles life throws their way. And believing that we are all family, all one humanity. "

San Francisco Chronicle

Animated Bassett

Angela Bassett is feeling a bit better now that her flight has landed. However, munching on grapes and viewing the Chicago skyline from the window of her downtown hotel suite, she admits over the phone, "I was very ornery this morning."

The reason: As she began a cross-country tour to promote "Meet the Robinsons," the star of Disney's new animated feature had to leave her 14-month-old twins, Bronwyn and Slater, behind.

"They don't understand where you were and why you weren't there," says Bassett, 48. "They have their little personalities and attitudes, so when I get to go home, I'm ecstatic seeing them, yet it takes time to get back in."

Bassett's nurturing qualities have served her well in "Meet the Robinsons." She provides the voice for Mildred, the kindly caretaker of the orphanage where ingenious boy inventor Lewis spends the first 12 years of his life before he begins time-traveling adventures with the zany Robinson family. The young hero must overcome the nefarious villain Bowler Hat Guy, who rules the Evil Future, in the quest to find his family and move into the future to make a better world. It's up to Bassett's character to buoy the kid's spirit during the lonely early years, when adopting families keep passing him over for other orphans.

"This was an easy role to get into," Bassett says. "I thought about this special boy who wants so much to be a part of a family and is just looking for acceptance. That really tugs at your heart. Mildred sees his uniqueness and has this desire to keep his little spirit hopeful."

"Meet the Robinsons" is Bassett's first animated feature, though she did voice an elephant on an earlier short-lived Disney project .

"I worked on a live-action thing called 'Whisper' years ago that never saw the light of day," she says, laughing. "They followed elephants for a year, then put voices to that. It was a very interesting concept. I was the mother elephant. I was Whisper's mama. I guess I must have maternal bones in my body."

Like Lewis, who persists in his dream, Bassett rates perseverance as one of her key attributes. She galvanized audiences in 1993 with her Oscar-nominated performance as Tina Turner in "What's Love Got to Do With It," and subsequently starred in vehicles including "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" (1998) and "Akeelah and the Bee," her third film with Laurence Fishburne. But Bassett has also turned to theater to find the kinds of challenging roles sometimes missing in Hollywood movies. Last year, she appeared with Fishburne in a critically successful Los Angeles production of August Wilson's "Fences."

"It is frustrating," Basset says of the dearth of good film roles for mature actresses. "And it is also the nature of an actor be frustrated in that, even if you're working: Where's the next job? Your career course goes through its cycles, its ups and downs. Gender and race and age, all those things come into play and intersect at some point. Those are things you have no control over, yet they color the landscape. There have been great highs and a few disappointments, but all in all it's been a fabulous journey."

Bassett recounts that journey in "Friends: A Love Story," an autobiography she co-authored with her husband, actor Courtney B. Vance.

"It's about the transformative power of love, of yourself first, love of community, love of your craft, love of God, love of your children," she says. "I talk about various experience trials, positive or negative, that went into making me who I am."

The book, published on Valentine's Day, describes Bassett's experiences growing up poor in St. Petersburg, Fla.; the mentor who encouraged her, at age 15, to apply to Yale University (she got in); and dealing with an excruciating spinal cyst that impeded her progress at school. Bassett also writes about discovering firsthand just how dramatic family dynamics can be. Attending the funeral of her father, she recalls, "I was literally tapped on the shoulder and introduced to a sister I never knew I had.

"Here's a sister you didn't have a clue about, you never heard a word about it. For me as an actress, I thought that was so interesting. So human. It's, 'Oh my God, we're just so fragile and crazy, the things we do, and the places our lives take some of us.' My younger sister, of course, who is not an actress, was very upset."

Bassett says she's looking forward to returning to the stage more frequently, including a possible Shakespeare production at Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater. She also hopes to team with Danny Glover on "Toussaint, " in which she'll play the wife of a rebel slave leader.

"Even at this point in the journey, I'm still enthused about the acting, about what's around the next corner," she says. "I get crazy when I lose a role, and I'm ecstatic when I win one. From the beginning, I've always had a resilience, which is useful in this business, since so much of it is out of your hands. What is in your hands is how you develop your character and what you bring when you show up on the set."

Pics of the Week

Concrete Loop posted some pictures of Angie getting off a plane at LAX that has sparked the ongoing debate between the BassettHounds. Tacia loves the norm and natural look, while SimSim prefers the glitz and glamour. I am partial to both.



She is an actress, so of course we love to see Hollywood Angela.


But for those who are truly BassettHounds, we like to lean towards the real Angie B.

What do you think?

Love Those Frames

Tacia might pay attention to Angie B's choice of hairstyle, but Manda loves the choice of frames. Here is a small collection of the frames Mrs. Angie BV wears.