Being Biggie's Mother

Angela Bassett on playing Voletta Wallace, mother of the Notorious BIG, in a movie of the rapper's life

WHAT KIND of world is it that allows, say, Jessica Alba super-duper fame and relegates the formidable Angela Bassett to cult status? Still best known for her Oscar-nominated performance as Tina Turner in What's Love Got to do With It? (1993), Bassett is as charismatic as any actor on earth. She has a wonderful, chocolaty voice and, at 50, is still dizzyingly good looking.

Yet, for all her charms, she is still not exactly a superstar. Today she turns up as Voletta Wallace, indomitable mother of the late rapper Biggie Smalls, in the surprisingly solid biopic Notorious. On TV she continues to play Dr Cate Banfield in ER. But we should be seeing more of her.

Last year, Denzel Washington told me that, despite his own successes and the many triumphs of Will Smith, it is still that bit harder for femaleAfrican-American actors to break through to the highest level. What gives?

“Hell if I know! I’m not the one giving out the parts,” Bassett laughs. “But I see some truth in what Denzel says. Look, it’s a boy’s club. There are more roles for men to start out with. If I’m a producer and I’ve got 20 male roles, hell, I can give one to Denzel. If I’ve only got two good female parts, that’s a different matter.”

Good point. But the business has got a little friendlier to black actors over the past few decades. Hasn’t it? “I suppose it must have done. I have done well, it’s true. But, you know, I still feel frustration because I would like to have worked more.”

It’s hard not to draw the odd dubious comparison between the early life of Biggie Smalls and that of Ms Bassett. Each grew up as the child of a single mother (she in Florida, he in Brooklyn) and both gained fame as creative artists. Mind you, remembering that Angela attended Yale and Biggie studied at Gangsta College, Hard Knocks University, we shouldn’t push the comparison too far.

“Voletta Wallace was talking to me on set once,” Bassett says, “and she said, ‘Your mother is a hero’. Well, I told her to write a note to her to that effect and send it to her. My mom knows who Biggie was and Tupac and so on. She’s retired, so has more time to keep up with that stuff.”

Mrs Bassett had Angela when she was just 21 and was forced to abandon her own education. No such diversions were to get in the way of her children’s success. School was the main priority and extra-curricular diversions were forcefully discouraged.

"You go to college! That was always the main thing. You go to college! But I have to be fair. If she was ever worried about me going into acting she never showed it."

Of course, it probably helped that Angela not only went to collegebut made it into the head-spinningly prestigious Yale School of Drama. Bassett explains that, aside from one worrying six-month hiatus in her early years, she was never out of work for long.

Following a decade alternating stage roles with smaller parts on TV, she caught the public's attention as Betty Shabbazz, wife of Malcolm X, in Spike Lee's biopic of the great African-American firebrand. Every thinking person who saw that film walked out and said: "Now, who the hell was that?" But it took What's Love Got to do With It? to make her a player.

"That is true," she says. "I do tend to divide my career into 'Before Love' and 'After Love'. And, well, you know, I always say 'After Love'is better. If you know what I mean."

What's Love Got to do With It? could have turned out to be a roaring embarrassment (it was a biopic of Tina Turner, after all), but Bassett somehow cast aside camp to locate the dignity in the durable singer. The core of the film was the relationship between Tina and Ike Turner, her abusive husband.

“She [Tina Turner] couldn’t watch it at first. She’d lived all that, so it wasn’t entertainment for her,” Bassett says. “But I can remember her showing me pictures of her from way back and me asking innocently: ‘What’s that on your jaw there?’ And she said: ‘Oh, that’s where he hit me and broke my jaw.’”

What people remember from Bassett’s performance is her embodiment of a proud class of unapologetic defiance. She can convey vulnerability too, but most of her subsequent successes have seen her turning those astonishing cheekbones into the light and daring opponents to defy her will.

Her performance in Notoriousis a case in point. Voletta Wallace, a Jamaican immigrant, tried hard to keep the future Notorious BIG on the straight and narrow and, in the years since his murder in 1997, has been his main defender. As producer of the film, Voletta kept a watchful eye on Ms Bassett.

“Well, I am a mother, so I have an idea how a mother would react if her son isn’t going to school. But Voletta had a say on how she was portrayed. She’s a very vocal person, a very nice person. There were very simple things that she wanted to get right, like the verses that were read at her son’s funeral. She was adamant about that.”

“Vocal” is often a euphemism for “bossy”.

“No. That’s not what I mean at all. She is a fierce advocate for her son, who was murdered. A lot of women would be half crazy after that. She has a lot of faith and that helps her.”

Well, quite. One of the strange paradoxes of Notoriousis that it simultaneously mourns Biggie and celebrates the culture that killed him. The film details the developing war between rappers on the east and west coasts, but it doesn't deny the guilty excitement of the artists' celebrations of violence, infidelity and materialism.

Angela, a church-goer who has been married to the same man for 11 years, must, surely, find this aspect of the film problematic.

“I am not a fan of gangsta rap,” she says. “There is a lot that is positive in hip-hop. There are a lot of talented people and then there are some that just want to be in the game. You have that in any industry. I know that Voletta and I feel that he got caught in the crossfire of that rivalry between the coasts and we want to show what a waste it was.”

Rock flicks: lives on screen

The rock'n'roll (or rap or country or soul) biopic is a genre with many rivers deep and quite a few mountains high. Despite the cheesiness of the later music, Angela Bassett did brilliant work as Tina Turner in What's Love Got to Do With It? More recently, Ray and Walk the Line managed to succeed despite – as the recent parody Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story argued – pretending that Ray Charles and Johnny Cash lived exactly the same life.

Dewey (like Ray and Johnny) loses a brother, disappoints his mother and finds themes from his songs’ lyrics creeping into his life. “My name is Sue. How do you do?” a boy doesn’t quite say to John at any point.

Mind you, cliches develop because they have power. If you don’t believe me, have a glance at Gary Busey in the first-rate Buddy Holly Story which, though it breaks no new ground, does a great job of getting across the raw power of early rock’n’roll.

Then again, if you’re in the mood for torture, you might want to have a glance at Oliver Stone’s The Doors, a film which is so ridiculous that neither the ghostly native American nor Meg Ryan are the worst thing in it.