An audience with Emmy winner Sheryl Lee Ralph , a fan favorite as no-nonsense teacher Barbara Howard on Abbott Elementary , makes for an exhilarating education. She commands your attention from the off. Truth is, for me, she always has.
Related Stories Reviews ‘The Fabulous Four’ Review: Bette Midler Leads Quartet Of Beloved Veteran Female Stars Who Deliver A Geriatric ‘Bridesmaids’ Podcast 20 Questions On Deadline Podcast: Sheryl Lee Ralph Talks ‘Abbott Elementary’ Season 3, Her Secrets To Happiness & Best Life Advice In my youth, on a trip with a girlfriend to New York, we purchased tickets way up in the Imperial Theatre’s balcony to see a show called Dreamgirls . That was my first lesson in Broadway. That was my first lesson in Broadway theatre magic.
That was my first lesson in witnessing the artistry of Sheryl Lee Ralph, who glided seamlessly across the Imperial’s stage as Deena Jones. “I’m the dream that’ll give you more and more,” I remember her cooing into a mic. She gratefully acknowledges that while Dreamgirls gave her a pathway to a hard-won stardom — “Oh, my god it was brilliant,” she declares — she and her castmates lost out on the riches the show generated.
Not knowing any better, they signed away their rights in the production. ”I learned a lifetime out of that show, including selling my rights for a dollar, where I learned: sign nothing. I’m still learning it now.
Sign nothing, make no deals until it’s down in writing. And your lawyer has read everything because things change,” she states succinctly over Zoom from New York. Yeah, that’s why Aretha Franklin made a point of being paid, before a note came outta her mouth, in cash.
“Cash works, baby, or gold bars,” Ralph roars. Sheryl Lee Ralph Courtesy Bleecker Street In a more serious tone, she adds that there is a history of “people like us” who have “absolutely been taken advantage of.” Leaning closer in her chair, she says, more emphatically: ”We were absolutely taken advantage of.
But so was the cast of A Chorus Line , but they came together and did a class-action suit and got paid. The cast of Dreamgirls chose not to do that.” Looking backwards is by way of getting to Ralph’s latest movie The Fabulous Four , in which she stars with Bette Midler , Susan Sarandon and Megan Mullally .
They play once-close friends who spent their early 20s sharing apartments in New York and now, well, you know what happens: the plot contrives to reunite them. It’s what Pete Hammond, my Deadline colleague, refers to as “a geriatric Bridesmaids ” for “aging boomers.” Bleecker Street releases it Friday.
Ralph plays Kitty, who in the opening commentary voiced by Sarandon is introduced as the Nature Goddess of the quartet, due to her scientific research into the “healing” properties of weed. Pardon me, organic weed. She jumps on that and says that “originally when the script came out, she was basically a high-class drug dealer.
” Ms. Ralph told the film’s creatives, led by director Jocelyn Moore, that up with that she would not put.“ “And I said, for me, the image that I present to the world is very important.
And, I said, as a Black woman, I don’t want to be a drug dealer. I don’t want to be a pothead. I want to be somebody who is educated,” she relates in a manner that makes me regret not having been there.
“And when I say she’s a botanist, it was rewritten in there that she was just months from receiving her doctorate in botany,” she continues, “and that she was creating different strains of cannabis, but she was taking it very seriously, and looking into how cannabis might help people, not just in an enjoyable edible state but how it could help in their life and their health. I thought that was important. So did they.
” It does get a little old, I say, when Black characters are the drug-dealers, the robbers ...
you know the script. “Exactly,” she concurs. It’s exasperating that she, we, still have to push back at such stuff because it occurs “all too often, still way too often.
” That’s why it’s necessary, still, “to help people refocus the lens that they have grown accustomed to seeing through. “You know, just because you’ve been wearing the same eyeglasses for 10 years doesn’t mean that on your 12th year you don’t need a new prescription. There are new ways for people to be seen.
And I wanted to continue to use my voice to refocus the lens, the imagery of people of color, and still, Black people,” she tells me during our conversation, which is far livelier than the movie we’re there to discuss. (L-R) Susan Sarandon, Megan Mullally, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Bette Midler in ‘The Fabulous Four’ Bleecker Street However, the film does kinda attempt to grapple with some of the anxieties that aging brings. Which springs to mind the moment when Kitty’s daughter, played by Brandee Evans, tries to talk her mother into entering one of those places senior citizens are farmed out to for “assistance,” and Kitty snaps, “Do I look like someone who needs assistance living?!” Ralph takes up the line that follows, “That is when you stop living, leave me alone and let me live my life.
” We see these conversations around ageism going around, she says, noting that “there used to be a time when if you had a 60th birthday, you were dead in the industry.” She adds brightly, ”Well, that’s not true anymore. I am very much alive and thriving and loving it,” she says, kicking up her heels.
She’s enjoying “some of the best years in my life and the best is yet to come,” she pronounces, as I half expect her to burst into a chorus of “I’m Still Here” from Sondheim’s Follies musical. Ralph says she had fun making Fabulous Four and working with her co-stars, and that it was “fascinating ..
. to still be able to learn by watching the other artists that are around me.” She got to “hang out with Bette and she was so giving,“ and Midler was always telling her to “stretch.
” Ralph explains: “She would say to me, ‘Sheryl, Sheryl, look at me! Stretch, work out, stretch, work out, because you will start to shrink. Don’t shrink.’ I was like, for me, that said so many things, whether it’s stretching physically, stretching mentally, spiritually; stretch so that you do not shrink.
” Sheryl Lee Ralph is not gonna shrink, ever. Just last week she was Emmy-nominated, for a third time, in the Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series category for her role as Barbara Howard, the wisest member of Abbot Elementary’ s teaching staff. It comes after her 2022 win for her part in Quinta Brunson’s sublime creation.
Her comic timing, she believes, comes from her father Stanley Ralph, who was a music teacher in Waterbury, CT — where she grew up — and who wrote the state cantata “Nutmeg.” Her mother, Ivy Ralph, was a designer originally from Jamaica. “My dad always said, you know what, an educated artist is a very interesting artist.
So I have things in my head and I have just been taught very well, all the way down the line by all of the people I’ve worked with,” she says. “I’m telling you, the legends before me have taught me well, and I’m really a bit of all of them.” Her epic acceptance performance at the Emmy Awards has been viewed a gazillion times on YouTube.
RELATED: Watch Sheryl Lee Ralph Sings Her Speech After Winning Supporting Actress Comedy Emmy Reminds that, when we were introduced at last January’s Critics Choice Awards, I was allowed to shoot a brief video of her chatting to Robert de Niro where they talked about working together on the Barry Primus-directed 1992 film Mistress . The footage went on Deadline and garnered 6.8 million views.
“Such interest,” she murmurs. Then she laughs and says, “I’m loving the moment.” And I’m loving her energy.
How does she come by it, I ask? “I would really have to say, I have to thank my parents for that,” she answers. “My parents taught me to be strong. They taught me to be proud.
They taught me to own who I am. As a child of the ’60s, it was easy to be beaten down and to believe that you didn’t have the opportunities, you didn’t have the strength, you couldn’t achieve. But they made sure that I had the best education, a wonderful upbringing, and I thank them for that because no matter what comes my way, I will get through the chaos.
I was born for this, I was meant for this. And here I am at this time, I will carry on.” She declares: “I’m not invisible.
” Amen to that..
