Staying Fit
If we had a nickel for every actress who jumps into her third — or 10th — act in her 70s, well, we’d have a tiny handful of coins. Even more unusual? The septuagenarian who finds herself trading profanity-laced barbs opposite Ryan Reynolds (in Deadpool) while on hiatus from playing the bipolar matriarch at the shaky top of a dysfunctional family of music moguls (on Fox’s Empire, the fourth season of which will premiere Sept. 27).
Leslie Uggams guest-stars as Terrence Howard's mother on Fox's "Empire."
Fox
Not that Leslie Uggams, 74, is anything like your typical actress. Perhaps the most famous entertainer you might have trouble naming, Uggams says she got her start singing alongside “Louis and Ella and Dinah” (that’s Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Dinah Washington), at age 9, and then went on to star in Broadway musicals and create such groundbreaking roles as Kizzy on the 1977 TV miniseries Roots. Her award-filled, barrier-bashing résumé aside, Uggams insists she’s as surprised as anyone over her latest turns in one of
TV’s
hottest shows and Hollywood's most category-breaking superhero movie franchises.
An early fan of Empire, which she describes as “like Dynasty or Dallas but about today’s hip-hop world,” Uggams was watching the show one night when she turned to her husband and remarked, “‘Do you know, I should be on that show. I could be his mother!" Then she adds, in her regal and expressive voice: “Not even thinking in my wildest dreams that I would end up doing this fabulous show.”
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Snagging a role in Deadpool was even more unexpected. After getting called in to read for a project shrouded in preproduction secrecy, Uggams arrived “with no clue of anything about the character, other than the lines I’m reading.” Given that her dialogue in the highly irreverent superhero film covers everything from Ikea furniture assembly to firearms and masturbation, Uggams relays her struggle: “I’m trying to guess, 'What am I doing here? What is my motivation here?' ” While preparing for her second audition, she recalls stumbling onto one early insight: “I turned to my husband and I said, ‘You know, I think this woman is blind!’ ”
When she was finally allowed to reveal her role as Blind Al to others, Uggams says she was in for another shock: how important the character was to serious comic book fans. “I went, ‘Oh my goodness, I’m in another different world now, and I love it. I just love it.' ”
