Actress Carmen Ejogo

Carmen Ejogo is a British actress who has steadily appeared in movies since 1997.

If the name sounds familiar to you, that's because her most recent film, as of this posting, has been - and has made - news.  She plays Coretta Scott King in Selma, the historical drama of the 1965 voting rights march in Alabama. The movie, of course, caused a stir for depicting President Lyndon Johnson as somewhat reluctant on voting rights issues and called his credibility on civil rights at least partially into question.  As for Ms. Ejogo, her performance as Mrs. King earned her an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture.

  

There's no question, though, that Carmen Ejogo - who gets her exotic looks from her Nigerian father and Scottish mother - is an actress to continue watching. She got her first break at the age of thirteen with a role in the 1986 rock musical movie Absolute Beginners, which also included Sade (an earlier honoree on this blog) and David Bowie.  She played Maria in the 2000 present-day film adaptation of Shakespeare's  Love's Labour's Lost and she was also in the 2008 crime drama Pride and Glory (starring Edward Norton and Colin Farrell), among other movies.

She was married to American actor Jeffrey Wright, and she now lives in Brooklyn with her two children.