Is Alfre Woodard Hollywood’s best-kept secret or a symbol of its worst oversights? For more than 40 years, this unpredictable actor has lent her guarded intelligence and emotional acuity to an eclectic array of parts, from recurring TV roles (Desperate Housewives, Marvel’s Luke Cage) to indelible turns in award-winners (12 Years a Slave, Cross Creek) and franchise instalments (Annabelle, Star Trek: First Contact). Had a white actor crafted a performance as fine-grained as the one she gives in John Sayles’ 1992 film Passion Fish, where she plays a nurse administering discreetly tough love to a pampered, paraplegic ex-soap star, they would likely have had plum parts dangled in front of them like grapes before a Roman emperor. “If I had the access that some of my Caucasian colleagues had, what I’ve done might lay out on a spreadsheet differently,” she told Time magazine recently, proving that her talents extend to diplomacy.
To hell with the spreadsheet. Her work in the death row drama Clemency offers ample proof that she is operating at the highest altitude of screen acting. She plays Bernadine Williams, a steely, buttoned-up prison warden who has prosecuted 12 successful executions. Putting a man to death is all in a day’s work. It’s small talk and tenderness she struggles with.
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