 RADA-trained actress who made an impressive debut in Mike Leigh's Secrets & Lies (1996), in which she gave a quietly compassionate performance as an adopted black woman who discovers her white birth-mother, receiving Supporting Actress BAFTA and Oscar nominations, the first black Britisher to achieve the latter.
However, aside from a composer credit on Leigh's subsequent feature Career Girls (1997) and the telemovie The Man (d. Betsan Morris Evans, 1999), Jean-Baptiste was unable to build on this promise in British film. Citing racial discrimination after her exclusion from a parade of young British stars at the 50th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival in 1997, she left for America and has worked there almost exclusively since.
Melinda Hildebrandt, Encyclopedia of British Cinema
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FILM & TV CREDITS
