Sophie Okonedo surely possesses one of the most striking faces on our screens, a visage that probably a great deal to her mixed Nigerian-East European Jewish heritage. Thirty years ago I don’t think there were many black female faces in British drama but now we are really spoilt for choice. The likes of Thandie Newton, Nina Sosanya, Nikki Amuka-Bird and Michaela Coel have become familiar faces in the UK, many also cracking the lucrative American TV and movie markets.
For this almanac of TV treasures, I’ve tended to exclude film stars. Fortunately, as an Oscar nominee (for Hotel Rwanda) and Tony Award winner, her big screen and stage careers have not come at the expense of a serious CV of British television. And there are plenty of programmes I’ve seen myself.
Her first TV appearance I probably watched came in a 1991 episode of Casualty. She made a convincing young athlete brought in with mystery pains by coach Tom Georgeson, who was always playing slightly dodgy characters. Was he giving his charge performance-enhancing drugs or was it just a case of over-training to reach the top? I think between them, Duffy, Charlie and Dr. Julian (Nigel le Vaillant) wheedled out the truth.
In this era of endless crime thrillers (love ‘em!) it is perhaps surprising that I’ve never seen Sophie play a cop, although she is no stranger to the criminal justice system on the side of law and order. In the Nineties, she had a regular if peripheral part as Janet McTeer’s smart secretary in Lynda La Plante’s uncompromising prison series The Governor and has since played all sorts of legal professionals. In 2009 Okonedo was Maxine Peake’s solicitor in the absorbing second series of Criminal Justice, which was ‘stripped’ across a single week on BBC1. Then in the following decade she was fabulous as a barrister colleague and courtroom rival to David Tennant’s lead character in The Escape Artist. She had to juggle loyalties with the search for truth regarding Tennant’s dubious actions, but was he guilty of murder and consequently a danger to her…? It lost a bit of credibility towards the end but you really felt for Sophie’s character.
In 2016 she was promoted from a prominent human rights barrister to Director of Public Prosecutions in the thoughtful Undercover. Being a work of fiction, of course she had to harbour a secret past, involving her hubby Adrian Lester, which could jeopardise her reputation and career, while championing the base of an American death row prisoner. I can’t imagine a British DPP doing such a thing but Ms Okonedo seemed to make her character credible.
It hasn’t been all heavy stuff. Eleven years ago she was a stunningly exotic 29th-century queen of the UK in a moving Matt Smith-era Doctor Who adventure and before that a ‘bit on the side’ in a Murder Most Horrid comedy with Dawn French. However, Sophie seemed more at home on the other side of the equation, as a wronged girlfriend appealing for help from history professor Paul McGann in Sweet Revenge.
But when it comes to showing a full range of emotions, Okonedo is one of the best in the business. She may not have resembled a traditional Nancy but that mattered not a jot in a 2007 production of Oliver Twist, in which the character found regular conflict under the thumb of nasty Bill Sykes, played with relish by Tom Hardy. The previous year Sophie was out in Thailand. Great! Unfortunately her role had her washed away in one of the worst natural disasters of recent times. In Tsunami: The Aftermath, she was one of the many missing trying to be reunited with her family. Screened when the tsunami memories were still quite raw it was a powerful two-parter, combining a heady mix of thriller, drama and extraordinary special effects.
Nevertheless, if I had to choose a favourite Sophie Okonedo performance, I’d pick her role as factory forklift driver Jenny in Clocking Off. She featured throughout the third series, but starred in the episode written by Danny Brocklehurst, which received a BAFTA nomination. Back in 2002, she was a relatively unknown quality, but the series became known as fertile ground for new acting talent, from Maxine Peake to Ashley Jensen, as well as more experienced hands like Ricky Tomlinson, Lesley Sharp, Sarah Lancashire and David Morrissey. Unlike these familiar names, whose accents suited the Lancashire setting, Sophie is a London girl but that’s no problem for an actor as gifted as Sophie Okonedo CBE.
No comments:
Post a Comment