How many actors can say they have over 100 credits on their resume? Lynn Whitfield can.
The Emmy winner has a lengthy resume filled with classics across genres. The latest addition to her decades-long career is The Chi, on which she’s been a recurring guest star but will now be a series regular in the upcoming season. Whitfield joined us for a trip down memory lane in the TV Insider studio for our Career Rewind video series. In the interview above, she shares anecdotes from some of her most memorable projects, starting with Hill Street Blues in 1981 and leading all the way up to The Chi in 2024.
Whitfield’s Emmy-winning turn came in HBO’s The Josephine Baker Story in 1991. She reflects on that Emmys night with us. It would be a hard night to forget, as Whitfield reminds us that she had just given birth to her daughter just two weeks before she won big for the TV movie.
“There was so much going on, and I was a new mom. It was just many, many things,” Whitfield recalls. “But in retrospect and always, I do not know why I’ve not been invited back to the Emmys since, not to present, not to do anything else.” We don’t either. Emmys, get Whitfield back there!
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At 71, she’s still as hungry as ever to deliver good work. “People say [awards recognition] doesn’t matter, but in the quiet days and in-between times, it’s just such a lovely reminder that you’re in a very rare group,” the star adds.
A rare group, indeed. Whitfield was just the second Black woman in history to win Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie at the Emmys when she won for playing Josephine Baker. In 1974, Cicely Tyson became the first Black woman to win that category. Alfre Woodard, Halle Berry, S. Epatha Merkerson, and Regina King have also won that honor.
Whitfield has dipped her toes into many genres in her years onscreen. She tested her comedic chops on Martin and dove into ABC’s soapy primetime dramas on How to Get Away With Murder. She also worked with Denzel Washington on the TV movie The George McKenna Story, which she says above was in the middle of filming when Washington found out he was cast in what would become one of his breakout roles.
For some viewers, their introduction to Whitfield was when she played “Mama Cheetah,” aka Dorothea Garibaldi, in Disney Channel’s outsized hit The Cheetah Girls. To this day, Whitfield says, women will notice her in her bars and run up their tabs buying drinks for the mother of Raven-Symoné‘s character. “Honestly, I have dined out on being Mama Cheetah,” she grins.
Look back on more of Whitfield’s iconic roles in her full Career Rewind above.
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