Post by Journey2herpast on Oct 23, 2005 18:00:29 GMT -5
Thigpen died March 12, 2003 in her home in Marina Del Rey, California at the age of 54. Perhaps most widely known as The Chief in the popular Where in The World is Carmen Sandiego PBS children’s series, Thigpen’s work graced both stage and screen since the early 1970s. Her passing ended her current role as Washington, DC police clerk Ella Farmer on CBS’s The District. With Anger Management, in which she plays a judge, Thigpen was nearing her 30th feature film role and this week alone, she can be seen in six different movies airing on TV.
Born Cherlynne Thigpen in Joliet, Illinois on December 22, 1948, Thigpen was a renaissance woman. She practiced the craft of acting through a variety of media with equal truth and dedication. Her characterizations were as deep and rich as her voice, which she used to narrate more than 20 books on tape, including Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Though she appeared everywhere, she was an artist whose talent outshone her fame, particularly in her film and television work.
But Thigpen’s brilliance was obvious to theater audiences from the very beginning. After leaving a graduate theater program at the University of Illinois and a job as a high school English teacher, she arrived in New York and landed the first role she auditioned for, playing a disciple in an Off-Broadway production of Godspell. She went on to reprise the character in the 1973 film version. Her part in the film isn’t huge, but it offers early proof of her astonishing ability.
Like most black actresses with strong presence, Thigpen found that Hollywood didn’t know what to do with her. Thigpen fashioned her career as she saw fit. She took care not to be typecast, seamlessly genre-hopping from musical to drama to comedy, prompting Essence magazine to declare her "probably the busiest black actress around" in a 1992 article.
If Thigpen wasn’t the busiest actress, she was certainly among the most determined. The length and breadth of her career bears this out. In addition to her turn on The District, she appeared on popular TV shows like Law & Order, thirtysomething, The Cosby Show and All My Children. Her work on Carmen Sandiego netted Thigpen four Emmy nominations.
Moving on to film, she left an indelible impression in the 1979 cult classic Warriors. In this film about rival New York gangs, Thigpen played a radio deejay who spread the word to "all the boppers out there." What is remarkable about her work in this film is that although only her mouth is shown, she managed to carve out a character so haunting and familiar that 30 years later, people still recognized that those lips belonged to her.
In Lean on Me, Thigpen’s fiery performance as angry parent Leonna Barrett was the perfect foil to Morgan Freeman’s bat-wielding New Jersey principal, Joe Clark. The movie was a box office and critical success that introduced Thigpen to a new generation. Many actors would have been content with more of the same, but Thigpen was always one to move in unexpected directions, her impetus a humble one. "I wanted to be a working actor," she once told The Wall Street Journal. "I wanted to do what everyone else does with their jobs: make money, put it in the bank, buy a house, pay bills, make a living doing what I love."
Thankfully, doing what she loved always involved returning to theater and some of her most transcendent moments could be seen on the stage. Her Broadway work included Wendy Wasserstein’s An American Daughter, for which she won a Tony Award in 1996 for her enlightened portrayal of Dr. Judith Kaufman, a conflicted feminist of black and Jewish heritage. In 1998 she won the LA Drama Critics Award for her role in August Wilson’s Fences. Off-Broadway, she took home her first Obie Award for transforming herself into a displaced South African woman in Athol Fugard’s Boesman and Lena (1992). Her second Obie came in 1999, for Jar the Floor.
While anyone fortunate enough to have seen the actress in a live performance can bear witness to her mastery, it was her Lola in Cheryl L. West’s comedy about four generations of African American women that had jaws dropping. Thigpen’s work in Jar the Floor was heralded as epic, lyrical and blistering. One critic wrote that she did not take center stage, but instead, "it seemed to come to her, like an obedient pet." She brought so much to Lola, a middle-aged woman running from the realization that her finger-popping days may well be behind her, that she managed to do what all good actors strive for. She disappeared into the part.
Although we all looked forward to her reappearance in new roles, sorrowfully, there will be no more of Lynne Thigpen’s magnificent work. For her craft and her magic, she will be greatly missed.