The Girl With Something Extra

Photography by Joseph Sinclair.

At Yale, she enrolled in an acting workshop for African-American students that entailed working on plays. That helped her reach a comfort level that carries her through her live stage performances to this day. “I did over 30 plays at drama school,” she recalls. “By the time I was done with it, I was more comfortable onstage than in my own skin.” Which may explain her acclaimed turn as Maggie the cat in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof in London, or as Beneatha Younger in A Raisin In The Sun (which landed her a Tony award nomination), among others. But don’t ask Lathan to play favorites between film and live theater. “I like both,” she says. “The variety of doing both. With film, you get to go and explore a new city, become a family with the people on set, and kind of put the puzzle of the film together from beginning to end. I like the whole process. Then with theater you have the interaction with the audience, and every night onstage is different because every audience is different.”

Over the course of her career thus far, Lathan has gotten a taste of just about every venue—television, theater, film and even voice work. Her oeuvre of work includes stints on sitcoms such as Moesha and Family Matters (in the 90s), a recurring role in the popular series Nip/Tuck in 2006 and a dramatic turn in the television movies Disappearing Acts, opposite Wesley Snipes, and A Raisin in the Sun, with Sean Combs, a role she also brought to life on Broadway and for which she received a Tony nomination. Then there are the feature films, such as Blade, Alien vs. Predator, Out of Time with Denzel Washington, Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys, The Best Man (which is one of the top ten highest-grossing African American films ever made) and Brown Sugar, both with Taye Diggs, and Love & Basketball, with Omar Epps.

When she’s not onstage or filming on camera, Lathan is performing vocally—not as a singer, but as the voice of Donna Tubbs, the wife of main character Cleveland on The Cleveland Show, an animated TV series for grownups that’s a spin-off of Seth McFarlane’s Family Guy. She relishes the gig. “It’s so easy and so much fun. I can do it from L.A., I can do it from London, and I’m doing it from New Orleans. I’m working with a great group of people, who are brilliant, smart and funny—it’s a great job. You go in, laugh your butt off, and you’re done.”