#debbi morgan
Check out this great essay on Debbi Morgan’s career-best portrayal of frequently widowed 1960s Louisiana psychic Mozelle Batiste Delacroix in the richly evocative Southern Gothic melodrama Eve’s Bayou (1997, Kasi Lemmons; with co-stars Jurnee Smollett, Diahann Carroll and Samuel L. Jackson):
““We’re two of a kind, my brother and I,” Mozelle intones repeatedly, and it takes a formidable talent to play the sister of Samuel L. Jackson (at his most magnetic here, with no 12-letter words in sight). But Morgan actually upstages him. She has a way of gliding into a room as though on a dolly, and her reaction shots are so acute that the film uses them as punctuation. Her unsettlingly wide eyes flicker between emotions outsize and minute, and her sultry, worldly-wise voice sounds just as one imagines Ava Gardner’s did before the studio sanded down the Southern edges. She feels born of the bayous, as endemic to the region as Spanish moss… It’s worth considering Morgan’s turn not only as a great performance but as the kind of supporting work that’s hardly ever recognized—neither ingénue nor overdue, and not, like this year’s front-runners, a masquerading lead. It fuels the eternal hope that admirers of great performances, like Louis in Mozelle’s prophecy, “open their eyes and see that what they’ve been looking for is standing right in front of them.”” — Steven Mears, “On Debbi Morgan in Eve’s Bayou”,Film Comment (February 2016)
And see my previous post on this undervalued classic of black cinema here!
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ForWomen’s History Month, here is our Black Actress Canon, an archive of exemplary, iconic, and underrated film performances that expands the notion of what is largely recognized and rewarded as great screen acting, encompassing Evelyn Preer to Pam Grier.
(Source:TribecaFilm.com)
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