Happy Birthday, Lorraine Touissaint: Fem Film Rogue Icon Spotlight

 

Lorraine Touissaint’s headshot, 1992.

You know a film or television series will be especially wonderful if among the cast includes brilliant Lorraine Touissaint, a Trinidadian-born, Juilliard School graduate. It’s been high time to give her flowers. 

Ten years ago, Joe Reid wrote this Atlantic article, Five Essential Performances By ‘Orange is the New Black’ Standout Lorraine Touissaint, highlighting Touissaint’s contributions to the silver and big screen. Touissaint spent ten years on the New York theater stages before obtaining her first television role as Vera Williams on the soap opera One Life To Live. Her warm presence calls to mind that of the late Mary Alice mixed with the regal elegance of Cicely Tyson. She has the power to brew beneath her characters and come out sharp and strong, delivering her words with esteemed clarity.

However, Touissaint has yet to lead a big grand picture and definitely deserves that. She should be in rooms, talked about and given cover opportunities showcasing her distinctive smile. 

Then again, history continues to repeat itself— Black women actresses remain relegated to supporting roles, as crutches to primary white counterparts. Fortunately, Touissaint will always eat up her screen time. Her presence is meaningful and memorable no matter how many minutes she’s allotted. She could be the most insensitive mother in Middle of Nowhere or the most gentle grandmother in Fast Color. Even her short moments in RZA’s Love Beats Rhymes as Azealia Banks’s character Coco’s restaurant running mama Nichelle are divine perfection. She lit up a whole murky screenplay. The unique sound of her voice is part of her craft, her signature, able to wield soft sincerity and wisdom while also forcing us to take two steps backward, fear her wrath and fury. 

Nancy Miller and Deborah Joy DeVine’s Lifetime drama series Any Day Now stars Lorraine Touissaint and Annie Potts. Touissaint and Potts grace the cover of Philadelphia Inquirer’s TV Week, August 23-29, 1998.

Inside contents: Lorraine Touissaint as adult Rene and Annie Potts as adult Elizabeth on the left, Shari Dyon Perry as young Rene and Mae Middleton as young Elizabeth on the right. 

Touissaint bloomed on the Lifetime series Any Day Now co-starring with Annie Potts. Her lucrative television résumé eventually stretched into various different dramas— Frasier, Crossing Jordan, Ugly Betty, Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, Forever, Friday Night Lights, Orange Is the New Black, Rosewood, and Young and the Restless. Her voice has been heard in animated series such as Static Shock, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and Summer Camp Island. She’s starred in two TV movie adaptations co-starring Oscar winner Halle Berry— Queen based on the 1993 novel by Alex Haley and David Stevens loosely based on Haley’s grandmother and Darnell Martin’s Their Eyes Were Watching God based on Zora Neale Hurston’s powerful 1937 novel.

Lorraine Touissaint and Allison Jones star in the 1996 film Nightjohn directed by Charles Burnett (To Sleep With Anger, Killer Sheep), DP: Elliot Davis (Something Wicked This Way Comes, Get On the Bus, and Out of Sight). The film has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. 

Over the years, on the film side of life, Touissaint has worked with prominent women directors such as Ava DuVernay (Middle of Nowhere and Selma), Julia Hart (Fast Color), and Maggie Greenfield (Sophie and the Rising Sun), and Dianne Houston (Runaway Island), the first and only Black woman to be nominated for a filmmaker Oscar (Tuesday Morning Ride, short film). Another favorite Touissaint performance was Grandma Marley from Jenn Shaw’s 2023 short film Gaps, highlighted here in my essay at Carefree Mag. Hopefully it becomes a full-length feature. Touissaint has also received accolades from the Black Reel, Black Film Critics Circle, Critics Choice, the Chlotrudis, Screen Actors Guild, and Essence Black Women in Hollywood and nominations from the NAACP Image (six so far), Independent Spirit, and the EwWy (renamed Poppy) Awards. 

Touissaint in Oscar winning film Selma. DP: Bradford Young. 

Of Selma, Touissaint shared in Collider that her small role as the late civil rights activist Amelia Boynton was meant to be bigger:

“Pivotal scenes of mine were cut, that would have helped explain her in a better way. We don’t really know that she’s the character that invited Martin to Selma, and that she is the one that almost single-handedly had been prepping this community for years. She was relentlessly registering people to vote, and holding secret night classes to tutor the voters. She was prepping this community and building up the pressure in it, very quietly. By the time you meet her, she had been arrested countless times.”

Currently, Touissaint stars in the Equalizer TV series alongside Queen Latifah and will be in Todd Strauss-Schulson’s Silent Retreat co-starring with Dennis Haysbert and Larry Owens (Zach on Abbott Elementary). 

Touissaint plays Aunt Viola “Vi” Marsette to Queen Latifah’s Robyn McCall in the CBS series Equalizer. Maybe a future essay would compare Touissaint’s Aunt Vi with Tina Lifford’s Aunt “Vi” Violet Bordelon-Desonier on Queen Sugar, 2016-2022.

Other profound Lorraine Touissaint Quotes:

"Often times, the business is designed to make us feel powerless. I learned early on the power of [saying] 'no.' And as difficult as it has been, especially early on in your career, I knew that there was power in it. There are just some things that I just say no to." (BUILD Series, 2019)

“ I had an extraordinary mother who at 10, I said—I didn’t grow up with a TV—at 10, I said I want to be an actress. When everyone else in my family laughed, my mother did not. She’s the one who taught to live and ultimately taught me how to die.” (Essence, 2020)

“I don't take those kinds of compliments for granted, because there aren't a lot of roles being offered to African American women, especially age forty and above. I don't think there are enough roles in the media like Rene Jackson. But, I'm hopeful because the fact that our show exists is testament that things are changing, and I believe the networks are paying very close attention to our little show on cable.” (answer to a CNN.com transcript response regarding her “intelligent Black female portrayal” in Any Day Now, 2001)