Lupita Nyong’o’s first role in a feature film won her an Academy Award. She had graduated from drama school the year before.
In March 2014, at the 86th Academy Awards, Nyong’o won Best Supporting Actress for playing Patsey in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. She told the audience that it did not escape her for one moment that so much joy in her life was thanks to so much pain in someone else’s. Then she told every little child that no matter where they were from, their dreams were valid.
Mexico City and Kenya
Nyong’o was born in Mexico City in 1983, where her father, the Kenyan academic and politician Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, was teaching. The family returned to Kenya when she was a baby, and she grew up in Nairobi. Her father went on to serve as a senator and as governor of Kisumu County.
She studied film and African studies at Hampshire College in Massachusetts and worked on film sets as a production assistant. In Kenya, she acted in the television series Shuga and directed a documentary, In My Genes, about people living with albinism in Kenya.
Yale and Patsey
She then earned a master’s degree in acting at the Yale School of Drama, graduating in 2012. Before she had even graduated, she was cast as Patsey, an enslaved woman on a Louisiana plantation who suffers brutal abuse from her owner, played by Michael Fassbender. It was her first feature film role.
The performance won her the Oscar, the Screen Actors Guild Award and the Critics’ Choice Award, among others. She became the first Kenyan and the first Mexican-born actress to win an Academy Award.
After the Oscar
Nyong’o chose her roles carefully. She played Maz Kanata in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, Nakia in Black Panther (2018) and its sequel, and the double role of Adelaide and Red in Jordan Peele’s horror film Us (2019), which critics widely called one of the best performances of the year.
She made her Broadway debut in Eclipsed, a play about women in the Liberian civil war written by Danai Gurira, which earned her a Tony nomination. She also wrote a children’s book, Sulwe, about a young girl with dark skin learning to love herself.
What she speaks about
Nyong’o has spoken often about colourism, the preference for lighter skin that she experienced growing up. Sulwe came from that experience, and her 2014 speech at the Essence Black Women in Hollywood luncheon on the subject became one of her best-known public statements.
Her Oscar came on her first try, for her first film. The line from that night people still quote is the one about dreams being valid, wherever you are from.
