Randle, Theresa 1967–

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Theresa Randle 1967–

Actress

Theresa Randle’s first brush with stardom came with her lead in the 1996 Spike Lee film Girl 6. Randle played a smart, self-possessed young woman who works for a phone-sex provider operation, a job that allows her the time and energy to pursue a serious acting career. In a way, it was a situation with which Randle could identify—she herself had long struggled to make ends meet with commercials and bit parts, and the lack of decent roles for African American women had almost discouraged her into quitting show business by the time the Girl 6 script came her way. In the end, Randle benefited nicely from the slightly salacious attention given to film’s subject matter.

Randle was born in Los Angeles in 1967 and grew up in the rough South-Central area. From an early age she was fascinated by the performing arts, and especially loved Shirley Temple movies—though she did not exactly identify with the Thirties-era child star. “I didn’t want to be her—I’ve never wanted to be anybody else—I just wanted to have the same opportunities,” Randle explained to Essence’s Joan Morgan. By the age of five she had already declared her intentions of becoming a performer. For the time being, such plans were an escape from her reality. “So when my mom sent me to the market,” Randle told Morgan, “I would make my way past all the winos by pretending I was actually living a different experience. I could go back and forth without any fear.”

Randle’s affinity for performing and her mother’s recognition of it opened up the necessary avenues of opportunity for her. She was sent to endless dance lessons. “After school, I could never run off and play like other kids,” Randle told another Essence writer, Deborah Gregory. “I had to go to dance—tap, ballet, and African—or acting classes. I hated it back then, but now I am grateful for that foundation.” In high school, Randle danced professionally, began doing commercial work after college, and then won auditions for small parts in music videos. She also appeared in several Los Angeles-area stage productions, including Fight the Good Fight at the Los Angeles Cultural Center and Pieces of Musical Broadway at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Randle’s first memorable on-screen appearance came in the 1990 film King of New York; she played Christopher Walken’s bodyguard. She also had a small

At a Glance…

Born 1967, in Los Angeles, CA.

Career : Actress. First film role came in The King of New York, 1990; has also appeared in CB4, Jungle Fever, Malcolm X, Sugar Hill, Beverly Hills Cop III, Gtrl 6, and Space Jam. Randle has several Los Angeles-area stage credits to her name as well as television appearances as a guest star on Diffrent Strokes and Seinfeld.

Addresses : Agent—International Creative Management (I.C.M.), 8942 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, CA 90211.

part in The Five Heartbeats, then Spike Lee then cast her as one of the women in the infamous “girl talk” scene in his 1991 film Jungle Fever. He had originally asked her to take the part of Vivian, the crack addict role ultimately played by Halle Berry, but Randle refused. In 1991, she also appeared in an episode of Seinfeld. Lee also put her in his next film, the epic Malcolm X. In it, Randle played a teenager named Laura, the girlfriend of Denzel Washington’s young Malcolm. Next, Randle appeared as a sassy journalist in the comedy CB4, and made an impression as the paramour of Wesley Snipes’s drug-dealing character in 1994’s Sugar Hill. She also spent time on-screen with Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop III, released that same year.

Yet it was not until Lee offered her the Girl 6 lead that Randle’s life took a dramatic new turn. It was a difficult time for her—her brother had recently died of AIDS, and she was immersed in grief. Adding to this was her disillusionment with the film industry, and the lack of roles available for African American actresses. The racy nature of the Girl 6 script shocked her, but also challenged her, and she remembered how proud her brother had been of her film career, and his desire to see her succeed, Randle told Morgan in Essence. “It was his spirit that helped me through this.”

Randle told Morgan that when she first read the script, she was initially worried about the frank lines her character must utter in her line of work, and she asked herself whether she wanted to take her career in such a direction. Yet the script, written by an award-winning young African American playwright, Suzan-Lori Parks, was anything but exploitative. Parks herself had once worked as a phone-sex operator, and the women who work in the industry, as Morgan explained in Essence, are shown as “young, hip, fine, self-possessed, pimp-free and, most important, there by choice” in Parks’s script. Despite her initial reservations, Randle kept coming back to the script, “and realized that this was the opportunity of a lifetime,” she told Morgan. To inhabit the role, Randle learned a great deal about the phone-sex industry, and the women who work in it. “Actually most callers just want to have a conversation,” she told Sam Pratt in Esquire about the 1-900 phenomenon.

The lead character in Girl 6 works in the phone-sex industry to pay the bills, but earnestly pursues her acting ambitions in her off hours. “The movie’s really about the choices that women make to survive,” Randle told Esquire. In the film, to get through the ordeal of talking men through their fantasies Randle’s character imagines herself as various African American actresses, from Dorothy Dandridge to Pam Grier Girl 6 suffers the come-ons that men—on the whole, portrayed rather unsympathetically on-screen—offer up on the phone, but worse, deal out in person when she meets with casting directors about possible movie roles. Quentin Tarantino appears as one such unsavory character; Madonna also makes a cameo as the woman who owns the phone-sex business.

Naturally, Girl 6 was the target of media attention for its subject matter, but audiences who were seeking the usual Spike Lee mix of serious, socio-political matters and humor walked away disappointed. Lee also took some flak for Girl 6; it was the first of his films to feature a female lead character since She’s Gotta Have It, and critics felt it lacked any real message. Stanley Kauff-mann, reviewing it for the New Republic, called Randle “lively, pretty, [and] plays Girl 6 in a collection of dresses and outfits that would have cost this young woman about 200 years’ work,” and chastised Lee for what he called “close to a total lack of conviction” as the film’s director. People reviewer Leah Rozen described Girl 6 as an “exuberant but sketchy mishmash,” and praised the zeal and professionalism with which Randle approached the role.

Despite its failure to catch on with audiences, Girl 6 did give a sure boost to Randle’s career. She was next cast as Michael Jordan’s wife in Space Jam, the 1996 animated/live action movie. Her career seems destined for bigger things, but Randle desires first that the rest of the world might catch up with her gifts. “Too often I get a script that’s ‘written Black,’ and it’s so incomplete it insults my intelligence,” Randle told Morgan in Essence. “We need the powers that be to broaden themselves enough to realize that quality material can’t be based on color. It has to be based on what a person’s spirit has to give.”