Thandiwe Newton
Melanie Thandiwe Newton OBE (/ˈtændiːweɪ/ TAN-dee-way;[1] born 6 November 1972), formerly credited as Thandie Newton, is a British actress. Newton has received various awards, including a Primetime Emmy Award and a British Academy Film Award, in addition to nominations for two Golden Globe Awards. She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2019 New Year Honours for services to film and charity.[2]
Thandiwe Newton | |
|---|---|
Newton at the 2019 San Diego Comic-Con | |
| Born | Melanie Thandiwe Newton 6 November 1972 |
| Other names | Thandie Newton |
| Alma mater | Downing College, Cambridge |
| Occupation | Actress |
| Years active | 1989–present |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 3, including Nico Parker |
Newton is known for starring roles such as the title character in Beloved (1998), Nyah Nordoff-Hall in Mission: Impossible 2 (2000), Tiffany in Shade (2003), Dame Vaako in The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), Christine in Crash (2004), for which she received a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, Linda in The Pursuit of Happyness (2006), Libby in Run Fatboy Run (2007), Stella in RockNRolla (2008), Condoleezza Rice in W. (2008), Laura Wilson in 2012 (2009), Tangie Adrose in For Colored Girls (2010), and Val in Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018).
Since 2016, Newton has played a sentient android, the madam Maeve Millay, in the HBO science fiction-western series Westworld, for which she received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series and two Critics Choice Awards, as well as nominations for a Golden Globe Award, Saturn Award, and Screen Actors Guild Award. In 2017, she portrayed DCI Roz Huntley in the BBC drama series Line of Duty, which earned her a nomination for the British Academy Television Award for Best Actress.
Early life
Newton was born in Westminster, to Nyasha Jombe, a Zimbabwean member of a Shona chieftaincy family,[3][4] and Nick Newton, an English[5] laboratory technician and artist. Her family had been living in Zambia and later returned there, where her younger brother was born.[6][7] Her birthplace has been incorrectly reported to be Zambia in some sources,[8] but she has confirmed in interviews that she was born in London.[9][10] Thandiwe is a name of Nguni origin, meaning "beloved".[11][12]
When she was three years old, the family returned to the United Kingdom, settling in Penzance, Cornwall, so her father could help run his family's antiques business.[6] She attended St Mary's Roman Catholic Primary School.[13] Newton remarked at a TED conference, "From about the age of five, I was aware that I didn't fit. I was the black, atheist kid in the all-white Catholic school run by nuns. I was an anomaly".[14] She began dropping the letter w in "Thandiwe",[3] leaving it as "Thandie", pronounced /ˈtændi/ TAN-dee in English.[4]
Newton was raised in London and Penzance. She studied dance at the Tring Park School for the Performing Arts. Between 1992 and 1995, Newton studied at Downing College, Cambridge, where she obtained a degree in social anthropology.[15]
Career
Newton made her film debut in the coming of age comedy-drama Flirting (1991), filmed in 1989 but shelved for two years. She was credited as "Thandie Newton" and subsequently continued to use this name professionally.[3][10] She then portrayed the slave "Yvette" in the Brad Pitt/Tom Cruise film Interview with the Vampire (1994). Newton appeared in the Merchant Ivory production of Jefferson in Paris as Sally Hemings. Next, she played in Jonathan Demme's drama Beloved (1998), based on Toni Morrison's novel, in which she played the title character, the ghost of a young slave girl whose mother kills her to save her from slavery. The film also starred Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. Newton starred as Nyah Nordoff-Hall, again opposite Cruise, in Mission: Impossible 2. Her next role was in the low-budget film It Was an Accident, written by her husband, screenwriter Ol Parker.[16]
Between 2003 and 2005, Newton played Makemba "Kem" Likasu, love interest of John Carter on the American television series ER. She reprised the role for the series finale in 2009. In 2004, she also appeared in The Chronicles of Riddick and Crash. She won a BAFTA award for Best Supporting Actress in 2006 for her role in Crash. She played Chris Gardner's wife, Linda Gardner, in The Pursuit of Happyness. Also in 2006, Newton performed on radio in a pantomime version of Cinderella.[17]
In 2007, Newton co-starred with Eddie Murphy as his love interest in the comedy Norbit. She played opposite Simon Pegg as his ex-girlfriend in the 2008 comedy Run Fatboy Run. She next portrayed Condoleezza Rice, US National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State in W., Oliver Stone's biography of President George W. Bush. The film was released in October 2008.
Newton was an introducer at Wembley Stadium on 7 July 2007, for the UK leg of Live Earth. She was due to introduce former US Vice President Al Gore to the concert, but he was delayed, leaving Newton to tell jokes in an attempt to entertain the audience.[18] Newton next portrayed fictional US First Daughter Laura Wilson in 2012, a disaster film directed by Roland Emmerich and released 13 November 2009.
In July 2011, Newton delivered a TED talk on "Embracing otherness, embracing myself." She discussed finding her "otherness" as a child growing up in two distinct cultures, and as an actress playing many different selves.[19] In 2012, she starred alongside Tyler Perry in the romantic drama film Good Deeds. She was also in Perry's movie For Colored Girls (2010), adapted from Ntozake Shange's 1975 original choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. In 2013, Newton starred in Rogue, the first original drama series for DirecTV's Audience Network.[20] She left Rogue during the third season. In 2015, she starred in the US miniseries The Slap.
In 2016, Newton began portraying Maeve Millay in HBO science fiction drama series Westworld, for which she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, among other accolades. In 2017, she served as a narrator for the documentary entitled Bill Cosby: Fall of an American Icon, an exposé on the sexual assault charges laid against Cosby, which aired on BBC One. In the same year, Newton played DCI Roseanne "Roz" Huntley in the fourth season of BBC One's Line of Duty, a role for which she received a BAFTA TV Award nomination for Best Actress.
Newton appeared as Val in the Star Wars film Solo: A Star Wars Story, which was released in May 2018.
In a 2021 interview, Newton announced that her professional name had been misspelled for 30 years and she was finally correcting this, and would henceforth be known and credited as "Thandiwe Newton",[3][21] beginning with Reminiscence (2021), and would have corrections applied to her past performance credits.[citation needed]
Personal life
Newton married English writer, director, and producer Ol Parker in 1998. They have three children: two daughters, including Nico, and a son born in 2014. All three were home births.[22] She is vegan and was named PETA's "Sexiest Vegan of 2014" in the UK.[23]
In 2006, Newton contributed a foreword to We Wish: Hopes and Dreams of Cornwall's Children, a book of children's writing published in aid of the NSPCC. In it, she wrote about her childhood memories of growing up in Cornwall, and the way in which the county's cultural heritage made it easy for her to "enrich every situation with layers of magic and meaning".[24]
In 2007, Newton sold her near-new BMW X5 and replaced it with a Toyota Prius after Greenpeace stuck a "This gas-guzzling 4x4 is causing climate change" sticker on her BMW.[25] In 2008, Newton visited poverty-stricken Mali, describing it as a "humbling experience". She visited the village of Nampasso in the Ségou Region of the country.[26] In 2013, Newton led the One Billion Rising flash mob in London, for an end to violence, and for justice and gender equality.[27]
David Schwimmer (who directed Run Fatboy Run) called the actress "the queen of practical jokes".[28] Newton has expressed an affinity for Buddhism.[29][30]
In 2016, Newton stated she had been the victim of a director who repeatedly showed his friends a video of her in a sexually graphic audition which she made as a teenager.[31][32] Newton cited this experience as being a part of why she had taken the Westworld role, which involved substantial nudity. This role reflected experiences of survivors of sexual abuse while also asking moral questions about the meaning of humanity and what it means to be humane.[32] In 2018, Newton said she was disappointed not to have been invited to participate in Time's Up, a movement against sexual harassment, considering that she had been "ostracised" for having spoken out about alleged sexual abuse by a director.[33]
Newton was ranked one of the best-dressed women in 2018 by fashion website Net-a-Porter.[34] Later that year, it was announced that Newton was included in the 2019 edition of the Powerlist, ranking the 100 most influential Black Britons.[35]
Filmography
Film
Television
Music video
References
- ^ Gonda, Violet (24 June 2021). "The Hot Seat with Violet Gonda. Thandiwe Newton". YouTube. Retrieved 8 November 2022.
- ^ "New Year Honours List 2019". The London Gazette. 29 December 2018. from the original on 30 December 2018. Retrieved 28 December 2018.
- ^ a b c d Evans, Diana (4 April 2021). ""I'm Taking Back What's Mine": The Many Lives of Thandiwe Newton". Vogue. Retrieved 2 September 2022.
- ^ a b "Thandie Newton". aalbc.com. Retrieved 9 March 2021.
- ^ Barton, Laura; "'I was so incredibly self-conscious'" 4 September 2017 at the Wayback Machine The Guardian, 28 May 2008.
- ^ a b A Taste of My Life, Series 4 (BBC Two, 4 June 2008) Thandie Newton - Quote: Nigel Slater (host): "You were born in London but you didn't stay here for long did you? You went down to Cornwall?" Thandie Newton (answers): "'Actually I don't know how my mum and dad managed to do this. But we lived in Zambia, and my mum was pregnant with me. And I was born on a two-week trip back to London, and then we went back to Zambia and my brother was born there. And we ended up coming to England finally when I was three years old. So my dad could help out with the family antique business."
- ^ Lewis, Sian; "Thandie Newton: 'Condi was my hardest role ever'" 29 April 2012 at the Wayback Machine Independent.co.uk, 31 October 2008.
- ^ "Thandie Newton Biography" 21 January 2016 at the Wayback Machine Yahoo! Movies.
- ^ Williams, Kam; "Sweet as Thandie" 20 July 2008 at the Wayback Machine KamWilliams.com, 24 March 2008.
- ^ a b Gonda, Violet (1 July 2021). "Thandiwe Newton on reclaiming her identity". Retrieved 2 October 2022.
- ^ Simelane Kalumba, Phumzile (2018). Jublani Means Rejoice: A Dictionary of South African Names (2nd ed.). Modjaji. p. 289. ISBN 978-1-928215-49-3.
- ^ Campbell, Lucy (5 April 2021). "Actor Thandiwe Newton reclaims original spelling of her name". The Guardian. Retrieved 5 April 2021.
Thandiwe means 'beloved' in the Zulu, Ndebele and Xhosa languages. [...] This article was amended on 5 April 2021 to remove an incorrect phrase saying 'Thandiwe means "beloved" in the Shona language'.
- ^ Hards, Shannon (27 February 2019). "Thandie Newton was denied school photo in Cornwall because her hair was in corn-rows". Cornwalllive.com. Retrieved 9 April 2021.
- ^ "Thandie Newton: Embracing otherness, embracing myself". Ted.com. July 2011. from the original on 13 December 2012. Retrieved 11 May 2013.
- ^ . Dow.Cam.ac.uk. Downing College. Archived from the original on 22 January 2010.
- ^ Thandie's Mission, Evening Standard, she also starred in the Guy Ritchie film Rock n' Rolla as a michievous accountant. 22 July 2005. Quote: "...but turned down the Lucy Liu role in Charlie's Angels in favour of making It Was An Accident, a minor film by her scriptwriter husband Ol Parker."
- ^ "Doctor Who poised for radio panto" 7 December 2008 at the Wayback Machine News.BBC.co.uk, 15 December 2006.
- ^ Needham, Alex; "Live Earth: The live blog, part 2" 24 October 2016 at the Wayback Machine The Guardian, 7 July 2007.
- ^ "Thandie Newton: Embracing otherness, embracing myself". TED. 15 July 2011. Retrieved 20 June 2021.
- ^ "Rogue to Debut on AUDIENCE Network in April". directv.com. 7 January 2013. from the original on 15 May 2013. Retrieved 11 May 2013.
- ^ "Thandie Newton reverts to original spelling of first name, Thandiwe". BBC News. 5 April 2021. Retrieved 2 September 2022.
- ^ Eggenberger, Nicole (5 March 2014). "Thandie Newton welcomes baby boy Booker Jombe Parker in home birth". Us Weekly. from the original on 5 March 2014. Retrieved 5 March 2014.
- ^ "Thandie Newton named PETA's sexiest vegan". Toronto Sun. 23 December 2014. from the original on 2 April 2015. Retrieved 19 March 2015.
- ^ . WeWish.org.uk. 30 November 2006. Archived from the original on 6 December 2006.
- ^ McLean, Craig (7 January 2007). . The Scotsman. Archived from the original on 12 October 2007.
- ^ "Thandie Newton humbled by Mali trip". Contact Music. 4 February 2009. from the original on 9 June 2008. Retrieved 25 February 2009.
- ^ "Thandie Newton joins women's protest". CNN. from the original on 15 February 2013. Retrieved 15 February 2013.
- ^ "Actress Newton admits to pranks". BBC News Online. 4 September 2007. from the original on 3 February 2011. Retrieved 13 April 2009.
- ^ . Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Archived from the original on 17 June 2012. Retrieved 15 June 2012.
- ^ . Pittsburgh Urban Media. Archived from the original on 14 October 2013. Retrieved 15 June 2012.
- ^ . W magazine. 5 July 2016. Archived from the original on 9 December 2016. Retrieved 28 October 2016.
- ^ a b Nededog, Jethro (2 October 2016). "Westworld star Thandie Newton defends her decision to play a brothel madam". Business Insider. from the original on 4 November 2016. Retrieved 9 July 2017.
- ^ Oppenheim, Maya (25 April 2018). "Thandie Newton explains why she thinks the Time's Up movement didn't want her involved". The Independent. from the original on 3 January 2019. Retrieved 2 January 2019.
- ^ . Net a. Archived from the original on 30 December 2018. Retrieved 29 December 2018.
- ^ Hicks, Amber (23 October 2018). "List of 100 most influential black people includes Meghan Markle for first time". mirror. from the original on 31 May 2019. Retrieved 20 April 2020.