Anjela Lauren Smith 1973–

Actress, singer

At a Glance…

Selected works

Sources

A British actress who first appeared on cinema screens in the reggae musical Babymother, Anjela Lauren Smith has since appeared in several other witty, tough British films, including 24 Hours in London. She was particularly praised for her performance in Babymother, being described by The Guardian newspaper as “a genuine new star.”

Smith was born on June 27, 1973, and grew up in Brixton, South-East London. She attended Loughborough Primary School and Charles Edward Brooke Comprehensive School for girls. Her parents came to England in the 1950s from Barbados as part of a wave of immigration from the Caribbean that began in 1948. The youngest of four girls in a religious family where academic success was encouraged, Smith originally intended to study psychology in college. But she changed her mind about academic life when she was spotted by dance and acid jazz musician Barrie K. Sharpe in a club. After making the difficult decision to drop out of college in 1991, Smith spent the next two years touring Europe and the United States as a back-up singer and dancer to Sharpe and his partner Diana Browne. During this period she also appeared with pop acts Soul II Soul, The Pet Shop Boys, and Paul Weller.

Smith returned to education at age twenty, enrolling at the City Literary Institute in London, where she excelled in performing arts. Unable to afford to study full-time at a specialist drama school she also took acting classes at the Oval House Theatre. She described to Contemporary Black Biography (CBB) what she was doing in that period as “three years’ intensive work on the craft.” Smith said that she was inspired to work in film when, at the age of eight, she saw Al Pacino in The Godfather. In fact most of the actors she described as being inspirational to her are men. What she admires in actors such as Robert De Niro, Sean Penn, Samuel L. Jackson, and Pacino is their ability to convey deep truths about the characters they are playing.

Smith also has a longstanding passion for theater; she is a fan of musicals and musical theater in general. Her musical and stage background came to the fore when she broke into film as Anita, the lead character in the musical Babymother. Though the role came up soon after the birth of her son Fabian, and though she had plans to find work in theater, Smith told CBB that “The opportunity of doing a musical, my childhood dream, was too much to miss.” Smith, along with her co-stars Caroline Chikezie and Jocelyn Esian, was praised for the vibrancy and liveliness of her performance. The film is set in Harlesden, the working-class area of London, where the first wave of Caribbean immigrants established themselves in the 1950s, and where the colorful costumes worn by Anita and her friends contrast with their drab surroundings. As the plot develops Anita emerges from the shadow of her “babyfather,” Don Byron, to become a pop diva in her own right. The music and dancehall scenes are at the center of the film’s success; its dazzling climax comes when Anita and her friends go head-to-head with Don Byron in a talent contest.

Babymother was a success on both sides of the Atlantic, establishing Smith as a rising star of British

At a Glance…

Born on June 27, 1973, in Brixton, South-East London; children: Fabian. Education: Attended City Literary Institute, London, 1990s; attended Oval House Theatre, 1990s.

Career: Back-up singer and dancer, 1991-93; film and theater actress, 1998–.

Addresses: Agent —Elaine Murphy Associates, Suite 1, 50 High Street, London E11 2RJ, United Kingdom.

cinema. Her performance was described by the Guardian newspaper as carrying the film through its “stickier moments,” but in an interview with the Voice, Smith said that many people in the black community were unhappy about the film. The term “babymother” is used by working-class black men to describe women who have borne their children but are not their wives and the chaotic, sexually promiscuous lifestyle it represents was considered by some to reflect badly on black Britons as a whole. Yet although it concentrates on what the New York Times calls the slightly unreal “pageantry” of Harlesden street life, the film also touches on a more serious issue: the way in which young black women are trapped by the sexual politics of their peer groups. Anita’s lively, determined approach to life offers one form of escape. When the film aired on television the reception was more positive.

Smith considers acting a good career move and has thrown herself into a variety of different parts. At the same time as Babymother was showing in movie theaters, Smith was also appearing in the four-part British television thriller The Jump. Her next film role was a supporting part as Sherry in Greenwich Mean Time, also known as G:MT, a film about a group of friends growing up and trying to form a band. The film charts the way their relationships change as they suffer tragedy, doubt, and break-up. It was described as having “the same gauche, ambitious quality of its principals” and received only limited release in theaters, but while it has been compared unfavorably with The Commitments, G:MT does have an optimistic and infectious youthful vigor.

In Twenty-Four Hours in London, a semi-serious gangster movie set in London of the near future, Smith again took a lead role, this time alongside Gary Olsen. Playing Martha, witness to several killings, Smith demonstrates a keen comic sense as she struggles to stay alive while pursued by hit-men; her character Martha turns out not to be as naive as she appears. Smith told Voice that she was aware of the possibility that British cinema might have done too many gangster films, saying, “I love the whole genre of gangster movies… but we do need to be careful not to rinse it out.”

Smith’s career path has taken her from music to theater, to film; she has said that her aim is to “work broadly in film and theater.” And while Babymother seemed for a while to have limited her career to lighthearted musical films, appearances in The Jump and Twenty-Four Hours in London have revealed a more serious and darkly comic side. Besides her public performances Smith is also outspoken on the subject of the limited opportunities for black actors in British cinema and the lack of funding for black film projects. In 2000 she set up a series of workshops entitled “This Is How It Should Be Done” to help aspiring actors break into the profession and understand the way it works.

Selected works

Films

Babymother, 1998.

Greenwich Mean Time (a.k.a. G.MT ), 1999.

Twenty-Four Hours in London, 2000.

Death, Deceit, and Destiny Aboard the Orient Express, 2001.

Television

The Jump (four-part T.V. mini-series), BBC, 1998.

Sources

Periodicals

Guardian (London), September 11, 1998, p. 11.

New York Times, March 17, 2000, p. E27.

Sunday Observer, September 27, 1998.

Voice (London), September 14, 1998, p. 43; 2000.

Other

Additional material for this article was obtain from publicity documents supplied by Anjela Lauren Smith and from an interview conducted with her by e-mail in March 2004.

—Chris Routledge