Best Supporting Actress Nominees’s Acting Prep

Taraji P Henson is up for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, for her role as the woman who runs and nursing home, and discovers Benjamin Button on the doorstep.  She takes him in, becomes his mother.  

Oscars 2009 Best Supporting Actress Nominee

She is a spirited woman in the midst of all these aging people, who are getting ready to die.  She is a cherishing, loving mother, to this child who was born an old man.  And, even when he’s Brad Pitt, she convinced me of her maternal love for Benjamin Button.

I have two videos for this post. One is Taraji P Henson (pronounced Tar-AH-gie) giving some sparkling, unexpected, yet deep insight into her acting prep.  The next video is about how she heard about her Academy Award nomination, and how she felt when she knew that she was an Oscar nominee.

Actress Taraji P. Henson In 'Benjamin Button'

But first, I wish to put an excerpt by Betsy Sharkey, from an article she wrote for the Los Angeles Times: 

It is difficult to play both with, and against, type as Henson does with such gentle goodness in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” As a young, black servant in a whites-only nursing home in the 1920s, Henson’s Queenie could have turned into a one-dimensional relic left over from another place and time. Instead, Henson infuses such life into Queenie that you believe from the moment she picks up the impossibly hoary infant that she may be shaped by the prejudice that surrounds her but she will not share in it nor succumb to it. It is a difficult state of grace to achieve, particularly in what for me was a flawed movie. Yet Henson turns in a strong performance, creating a character so full of humanity and humility that you leave the theater half wishing that you too had been left on her doorstep.

                                 Sorry for the intro…if I find a better clip, I’ll replace it.

__by Dana Kaminski_