There could be so many more risks taken in using new people. The tried and tested becomes very boring' …
Sophie Okonedo. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Interview

Sophie Okonedo interview: 'I have to go across the Atlantic to get work'

Sophie Okonedo is one of Britain's most accomplished and acclaimed actors – but most of her job offers come from the US, where last month she won a coveted Tony award for a Broadway role. So why is the UK neglecting its black stars?

Mark Lawson

Friday 4 July 2014

F

ew British actors have had a rave review from Barack Obama. But there – on Sophie Okonedo’s mobile phone, when we meet in a cafe near her north London home – is the 44th president of the United States, revealing, in a dressing room at the Ethel Barrymore theatre on Broadway, that he and Michelle had “enjoyed so much” watching her play a poor Chicago mother in the recent revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1950s play A Raisin in the Sun, in a cast that also included Denzel Washington.

 

A Raisin in the Sun review – Denzel Washington shines in a bracing revival

Ethel Barrymore theatre, New York

This compelling staging of Lorraine Hansberry's play, which forecast America's profound social transformations, boasts taut performances from Washington and Sophie Okonedo

Tom Sellar

Friday 4 April 2014

F

ifty-five years after its Broadway premiere – the first for a play by an African-American woman – A Raisin in the Sun has returned to the Ethel Barrymore theatre. One way to watch this star-powered revival with Denzel Washington and Sophie Okonedo is to measure the distance from 1959, when Lorraine Hansberry's stately play forecast the profound social transformations to come from America's burgeoning civil rights movement. Acknowledging this history, director Kenny Leon prefaces the evening with a short audio clip in which Hansberry speaks of the need for a theatre that can illuminate the nation.

A Raisin in the Sun certainly fulfills that mandate, with its bracing story of WalterYounger's hope-hungry family on Chicago's South Side. Yes, the drama creaks in places, and overwrought characters speak in lyrical crescendos found only in plays of the era. But this compelling version of a repertory staple shows how clearly Hansberry can still call to us across the years. A black president may occupy the White House today, but plenty of Walter Youngers remain foreclosed in their dream houses.

'I need the iron to be real and hot' ... Sophie Okonedo in A Raisin in the Sun

Interview

Sophie Okonedo on Broadway: 'We try out different things every night'

In A Raisin in the Sun, her New York theatre debut, the Hotel Rwanda star likes to keep Denzel Washington guessing – neither of them knows what the other will do next, she says

Alexis Soloski
10 April 2014

When Sophie Okonedo learned that the director Kenny Leon had cast her in the Broadway revival of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, she commenced a series of high kicks.

Hansberry's play, about an African-American clan crowded into a cramped apartment on Chicago's South Side, was named after a line in the Langston Hughes poem Dream Deferred; when we speak a few days after the show's triumphant opening, Okonedo describes her Broadway debut as a "dream come true".

Sophie Okonedo drops her OBE for services to drama at Prince Charles' feet

 

Actress Sophie Okonedo was left scrabbling at Prince Charles’ feet
after her OBE dropped off her chest yesterday.

British actress Sophie Okonedo drops her OBE for services to drama at Prince Charles' feet

ACTRESS Sophie Okonedo was left scrabbling at Prince Charles’ feet after her OBE dropped off her chest yesterday.

By Mirror.co.uk
00:00, 18 DEC 2010
UPDATED09:34, 27 JAN 2012

The 41-year-old Oscar-nominated star of Hotel Rwanda was being honoured for her services to drama when the mishap occurred.

Sophie said: “It was embarrassing. I’m just glad I didn’t trip over.”

Also honoured at Buckingham Pal­­­­ace was bomb expert Karl Ley, 29.

He received the George Medal for clearing more roadside bombs than anyone in history. The dad of three, from Sheffield, defused 139 dev­­ices during one tour of Afghanistan.

MIRROR

 

Sophie Okonedo stars in Skin, a new film about apartheid in South Africa. 

Photograph: Gareth Davies/Getty Images

Interview

Question Time: Sophie Okonedo

Sophie Okonedo on growing up with a huge afro and a Jewish mum, her new film Skin, and why she's excited about playing Winnie Mandela

Hannah Pool
16 July 2009

In your new film Skin you play Sandra Laing, a black woman born in 50s South Africa to Afrikaner parents. Does her story tell us anything about race today?

Oh God, don't ask me questions like that. I don't know. What interests me is that I've been brought up in a white family, and, being black myself, I can really relate to that side of it – questioning your heritage and where you're from; asking, "Is this really my parent?" Particularly when you're young, and everyone says, "That can't be your mum." Nowadays everyone's mixed race, it's not such a big deal, but in the 70s when I was growing up it was more unusual. I used to say, "Mum, am I adopted?" So I can really relate to that – knowing something's not quite right but not being quite sure what it is. My mother's Jewish, so my family is Jewish, and it was hard to believe this young girl with a huge afro had a Jewish mum. But nowadays, anything goes.

Sophie Okonedo / 'I guess I'm up for grabs now'

Sophie Okonedo

Sophie Okonedo

'I guess I'm up for grabs now'

Last week you would have passed her in the street. Next week British actress Sophie Okonedo will be heading up the red carpet hoping for an Oscar. It's all a long way from selling clothes at Portobello Market

Liz Hoggard

Sunday 20 February 2005

W

hen news broke of Sophie Okonedo's surprise Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress for Hotel Rwanda, it was a genuine cause for celebration. A Rada-trained actress in her mid-thirties who is most definitely not part of the luvvie establishment (despite acclaimed performances with the RSC and the Royal Court), Okonedo is the first black British actress to be nominated since Marianne Jean-Baptiste in 1996.

Newspapers fell over themselves to profile Okonedo and a common theme began to emerge. Words such as 'Cinderella', 'tragic' and 'sink estate' cropped up regularly - alluding to Okonedo's early upbringing on north London's Chalkhill estate. Her mixed-race heritage was picked over (her mother is Jewish, her father Nigerian); ditto her parents' separation when she was five. Tabloid reporters stalked her seven-year-old daughter at school and harassed her 90-year-old grandmother.

While the American media celebrates its hot young stars, one senses that the media here 'punish' young British women who do well. 'For a moment I thought of hopping on a plane back to America,' Okonedo admits. 'But I'm pretty secure about who I am. Anything that's truthful I'm not ashamed of. I suppose I have to look at it from their point of view because I never really did interviews before. I could get away with it because there was always a more famous actor in everything I did. But I knew it would be necessary for Hotel Rwanda, so I changed my view. I guess I'm up for grabs now, so long as they don't upset my daughter - I'm quite strict about that.'

 

After Earth – review

Philip French

Sunday 9 June 2013

Little is expected now from the once fashionable director of such movies as The Sixth Sense and Signs, and this dystopian SF movie is his most conventional to date.

Will Smith plays a general living in a gleaming new city created in outer space after Earth became uninhabitable. Ordered by his beautiful wife (an ill-served Sophie Okonedo) to bond with their depressed son ("He doesn't need a commanding officer, he needs a father"), Smith takes the lad on a flight to another planet. On the way they run into an interstellar storm, crash-land on the abandoned Earth, and the boy (played by Smith's real-life son, Jaden) must make a hazardous journey to find a beacon that will bring assistance to his injured dad. It's dull stuff, indifferently staged, with heavy-handed references to Moby-Dick.

THE GUARDIAN