Thandiwe Newton

Newton was born in Westminster, London, England, to Nyasha Jombe, a Zimbabwean member of a Shona chiefdom family,[4][5] and Nick Newton, an English[6] laboratory technician and artist. Her family had been living in Zambia and later returned there, where her younger brother was born.[7][8] Her birthplace has been incorrectly reported to be Zambia in some sources,[9] but she has confirmed in interviews that she was born in London.[10][11] Thandiwe is a name of Nguni origin, meaning "beloved".[12][13]

When she was three years old, the family moved to England, settling in Penzance, Cornwall, so her father could help run his family's antiques business.[7] She attended St Mary's Roman Catholic Primary School.[14] Newton remarked at a TED conference, "From about the age of five, I was aware that I didn't fit. I was the black, atheist kid in the all-white Catholic school run by nuns. I was an anomaly."[15] She began dropping the letter w in "Thandiwe",[4] leaving it as "Thandie", pronounced /ˈtændi/ TAN-dee in English.[5]

Newton was raised in London and Penzance. She studied dance at the Tring Park School for the Performing Arts. Between 1992 and 1995, Newton studied at Downing College, Cambridge, where she obtained a degree in social anthropology.[16]

Newton in 2007

Newton made her film debut in the coming of age comedy-drama Flirting (1991). She was credited as "Thandie Newton" due to a misspelling of her first name, and subsequently continued to use this name professionally.[4] She then portrayed the slave "Yvette" in the Brad Pitt/Tom Cruise film Interview with the Vampire (1994). Newton appeared in the Merchant Ivory production of Jefferson in Paris as Sally Hemings. Next, she played in Jonathan Demme's drama Beloved (1998), based on Toni Morrison's novel, in which she played the title character, the ghost of a young slave girl whose mother kills her to save her from slavery. The film also starred Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. Newton starred as Nyah Nordoff-Hall, again opposite Cruise, in Mission: Impossible 2. Her next role was in the low-budget film It Was an Accident, written by her husband, screenwriter Ol Parker.[17]

Between 2003 and 2005, Newton played Makemba "Kem" Likasu, love interest of John Carter on the American television series ER. She reprised the role for the series finale in 2009. In 2004, she also appeared in The Chronicles of Riddick and Crash. She won a BAFTA award for Best Supporting Actress in 2006 for her role in Crash. She played Chris Gardner's wife, Linda Gardner, in The Pursuit of Happyness. Also in 2006, Newton performed on radio in a pantomime version of Cinderella.[18]

In 2007, Newton co-starred with Eddie Murphy as his love interest in the comedy Norbit. She played opposite Simon Pegg as his ex-girlfriend in the 2008 comedy Run Fatboy Run. She next portrayed Condoleezza Rice, US National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State in W., Oliver Stone's biography of President George W. Bush. The film was released in October 2008.

Newton was an introducer at Wembley Stadium on 7 July 2007, for the UK leg of Live Earth. She was due to introduce former US Vice President Al Gore to the concert, but he was delayed, leaving Newton to tell jokes in an attempt to entertain the audience.[19] Newton next portrayed fictional US First Daughter Laura Wilson in 2012, a disaster film directed by Roland Emmerich and released 13 November 2009.

In July 2011, Newton delivered a TED talk on "Embracing otherness, embracing myself." She discussed finding her "otherness" as a child growing up in two distinct cultures, and as an actress playing many different selves.[20] In 2012, she starred alongside Tyler Perry in the romantic drama film Good Deeds. She was also in Perry's movie For Colored Girls (2010), adapted from Ntozake Shange's 1975 original choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. In 2013, Newton starred in Rogue, the first original drama series for DirecTV's Audience Network.[21] She left Rogue during the third season. In 2015, she starred in the US miniseries The Slap.

In 2016, Newton began portraying Maeve Millay in HBO science fiction drama series Westworld, for which she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, among other accolades. In 2017, she served as a narrator for the documentary entitled Bill Cosby: Fall of an American Icon, an exposé on the sexual assault charges laid against Cosby, which aired on BBC One. In the same year, Newton played DCI Roseanne "Roz" Huntley in the fourth season of BBC One's Line of Duty, a role for which she received a BAFTA TV Award nomination for Best Actress.

Newton appeared as Val in the Star Wars film Solo: A Star Wars Story, which was released in May 2018.

In a 2021 interview, Newton announced that her professional name had been misspelled for 30 years and she was finally correcting this, and would henceforth be known and credited as "Thandiwe Newton",[4][2] beginning with Reminiscence (2021), and would have corrections applied to her past performance credits.

Newton on a visit to 10 Downing Street in 2010

Newton married English writer, director, and producer Ol Parker in 1998. They have three children: two daughters, including Nico, and a son born in 2014. All three were home births.[22] She is vegan and was named PETA's "Sexiest Vegan of 2014" in the UK.[23]

In 2006, Newton contributed a foreword to We Wish: Hopes and Dreams of Cornwall's Children, a book of children's writing published in aid of the NSPCC. In it, she wrote about her childhood memories of growing up in Cornwall, and the way in which the county's cultural heritage made it easy for her to "enrich every situation with layers of magic and meaning".[24]

In 2007, Newton sold her near-new BMW X5 and replaced it with a Toyota Prius after Greenpeace stuck a "This gas-guzzling 4x4 is causing climate change" sticker on her BMW.[25] In 2008, Newton visited poverty-stricken Mali, describing it as a "humbling experience". She visited the village of Nampasso in the Ségou Region of the country.[26] In 2013, Newton led the One Billion Rising flash mob in London, for an end to violence, and for justice and gender equality.[27]

David Schwimmer (who directed Run Fatboy Run) called the actress "the queen of practical jokes".[28] Newton has expressed an affinity for Buddhism.[29][30]

In 2016, Newton stated she had been the victim of a director who repeatedly showed his friends a video of her in a sexually graphic audition which she made as a teenager.[31][32] Newton cited this experience as being a part of why she had taken the Westworld role, which involved substantial nudity. This role reflected experiences of survivors of sexual abuse while also asking moral questions about the meaning of humanity and what it means to be humane.[32] In 2018, Newton said she was disappointed not to have been invited to participate in Time's Up, a movement against sexual harassment, considering that she had been "ostracised" for having spoken out about alleged sexual abuse by a director.[33]

Newton was ranked one of the best-dressed women in 2018 by fashion website Net-a-Porter.[34] Later that year, it was announced that Newton was included in the 2019 edition of the Powerlist, ranking the 100 most influential Black Britons.[35]

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