In 1997, the actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste became the first Black British woman to receive an Oscar nomination, for Mike Leigh’s suburban gut punch Secrets & Lies. She was heartbreaking in it, as a young Londoner searching for her birth mother (Brenda Blethyn). This week she became a Bafta nominee for the second time. For much of the Noughties, though, Jean-Baptiste solved missing person cases on US TV’s Without a Trace. She’d get a bit bored.
“It felt like a factory,” the 57-year-old remembers. “You had to get your dialogue right, hit your mark, talk a lot about blood spatter. Occasionally you’d get an acting note from a director, but it wasn’t encouraged.” The cop drama ran for seven years and 160 episodes. How many variations can an actor realistically do on lines like “Where’d they go?”
