My father had to explain to me that no, JFK was not a Negro." And I said, 'Well, is Kennedy a Negro?' My parents were adamantly in support of Kennedy, so I figured that he must be a Negro that was the form of support that was discussed. "I remember asking my dad if he was a Negro, and he said yes. "There were political conversations all the time at the dinner table," he says. It seems appropriate: Throughout a decades-long acting, writing, and directing career on stage and screen, Smith has confronted issues of racial identity, politics, and history through his interpretations of events and the lives of iconic figures-many of them African-American.īorn in Berkeley and raised in the Crenshaw district of Los Angeles to a lawyer father and dentist mother, Smith's parents informed his social awareness at an early age. He and his wife, LeTania Kirkland Smith, have three children.Family legend has it that Roger Guenveur Smith '77 was conceived at an NAACP gathering in Monterey. He is divorced from Carolina Smith, the mother of his adult daughter. Smith works and resides in Los Angeles, California. Juan and John, written and performed by Guenveur Smith, is based on baseball's most famous fight-San Francisco Giants pitcher Juan Marichalclubbing Johnny Roseboro of the Los Angeles Dodgers with his bat during a 1965 battle for the pennant at Candlestick Park-which traumatized the playwright as a child. Smith also had a recurring role in the hit HBO series Oz. Most recently he played the role of "Isaiah" in the 2016 film The Birth of a Nation, a film about the life of Nat Turner. Smith was in the 2007 film American Gangster with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, in which he played the role of "Nate", Frank Lucas's army connection in Vietnam. In 2006, he played the main villain in the straight-to-video actioner Mercenary for Justice, opposite Steven Seagal. In 2000, he portrayed Agent Screck in the first installment of the Final Destination horror films. He also played a villain in All About the Benjamins (2002) with Ice Cube. ![]() Smith starred with Laurence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum in the 1992 film Deep Cover. He portrayed a corrupt detective in the martial arts/crime film Fist of the Warrior, alongside Ho-Sung Pak and Sherilyn Fenn. Smith was also the voice of Bao-Dur in the video game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II The Sith Lords. Also in 2003, Smith read in the HBO documentary, Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives the film, based on interviews conducted by the WPA in the 1930s with formerly enslaved African Americans, is a compilation of slave narratives with actors emulating the original conversation with the interviewer. In 2003, he had a starring role in the Steven Soderbergh/George Clooney TV series K-Street on HBO. In addition to his performances in major studio productions, Smith continues to work in and support independent film projects. Newton, for which Smith received an Obie Award, a performance was later filmed by Spike Lee and released in 2001. Newton Story, a one-man theatre performance based on the life of Black Panther Party founder Huey P. In 1996, he starred in the self-written and produced A Huey P. During the 1990s, he had a recurring role on A Different World. ![]() He has appeared in films such as School Daze, Do the Right Thing, King of New York, Deep Cover, Panther, Malcolm X, Poetic Justice, Get On The Bus, Eve's Bayou, He Got Game, and Summer of Sam. In film, Smith has collaborated with Spike Lee on several works. Additionally, Smith studied at the Keskidee Arts Centre in London, England. ![]() He attended Loyola high school in Los Angeles, Occidental College (American Studies) in Los Angeles and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where he successfully auditioned for the Drama School, switching from his pursuit of a graduate degree in History. Smith was born in 1955 in Berkeley, California, the son of Helen Guenveur, a dentist, and Sherman Smith, a judge.
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