Angela Bassett is Back for ‘9-1-1’ Season 8—From Ivy League Education to Award-Winning Career!

The award-winning Angela Bassett has made an indelible mark on the film and television industry, and she’s certainly not slowing down anytime soon. Born in New York and raised in Florida, it was during high school that the now-66-year-old actress was bitten by the acting bug after she was taken by a performance of Of Mice and Men that featured none other than James Earl Jones.

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Studying drama at Yale University, her early career consisted of stage work in plays while also appearing on the screen in shows like Ryan’s Hope, Search for Tomorrow, Spenser: For Hire and more. Some of the film roles that made up her resume prior to her breakout roles were in movies including F/X (1986), Liberty (1986), Boys n the Hood (1991) and Malcom X in 1992 alongside Denzel Washington.

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Soon after, she received an Academy Award nomination for her role as Tina Turner in the 1993 biopic What’s Love Got To Do With It? Throughout the 90s, Bassett kept busy, taking on a wide array of roles including Panther (1995), Waiting to Exhale (1995) and How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998). When the 2000s came along, she began integrating television work into her repertoire, making a splash with her role in The Rosa Parks Story , for which she earned herself an Emmy nomination.

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Angela Bassett TV shows and 9-1-1

In the early 2000s, she could be seen in a few episodes of Alias before joining the final season of ER . Over the years, Bassett has woven TV work into her countless film credits, from series like American Horror Story to Bojack Horseman . Her most recent and perhaps most notable, however, is on FOX’s 9-1-1 , where she brings to life the role of Athena Grant.

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“ Athena is very accomplished and she’s quite the professional,” Bassett told Deadline . “She sees things as black and white—it’s right or it’s wrong. She thinks quickly about how to settle or neutralize a situation, and it may not be straight by the book. She’s been in probably hundreds of thousands of situations, but she understands human nature, on the job. I really appreciate her smarts as an officer.”

Angela Bassett in Black Panther

Another role that has left a significant mark for Bassett in recent years has been that of Ramonda in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that she first debuted in the 2018 film Black Panther . For her role, she became the first actor nominated for an Academy Award for a Marvel film role, something that isn’t lost on her.

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“ Well, it’s so modern ,” she said of the appeal of Marvel films to The New Yorker . “We try and stay current, and they’ve got a winning formula. You just want to be in the mix there, working with wonderful filmmakers.” She continued, “But the attention to detail, the support, the money that they have to really support the filmmaker and the process is astounding, as opposed to ‘Hurry up and rush, rush, rush.’ It’s been a great ensemble of folks.”

Fans of Angela Bassett can see her return to the screen with the season 8 premiere of 9-1-1 airing on Thursday, September 26 at 8 p.m. Don’t miss it! Tune in to see Angela Bassett shine once again.

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