Marianne Jean-Baptiste: ‘People were following a narrative that had been created to explain me’
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‘Secrets & Lies’ made her the first Black British woman to be nominated for an Oscar. Now, nearly 30 years and 160 episodes of the ‘factory-like’ US cop drama ‘Without a Trace’ later, she has reunited with Mike Leigh for the blistering ‘Hard Truths’ – it’s earned her a Bafta nomination, and could send her back to the Academy Awards, too. She speaks to Adam White.
![[Complex curmudgeon: Jean-Baptiste, with Michele Austin, in Mike Leigh’s ‘Hard Truths’]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/17/08/newFile-3.jpg)
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.
![[Long-time collaborators: Jean-Baptiste and her ‘Hard Truths’ director Mike Leigh]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/17/15/newFile-4.jpg)
“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?”.
![[Suburban gut punch: Jean-Baptiste and Brenda Blethyn in ‘Secrets & Lies’]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/17/08/newFile-4.jpg)
So in lieu of actual character development, Jean-Baptiste would make it up herself. She’d map out the personal life and after-school basketball schedule of her off-camera son, decide whether or not her off-camera husband would have made their off-camera dinner the night before. “I did an interrogation scene once where I just started writing down the character’s shopping list on a bit of paper,” she laughs. “Because she would be thinking about other things at work, wouldn’t she?” Jean-Baptiste did this, she says, to “stay honest”. And, well, because it’s the Mike Leigh way.
![[Show-stealing turn: Jean-Baptiste in Peter Strickland’s experimental horror film ‘In Fabric’]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/17/08/newFile-5.jpg)
