Tasha Smith: film's bad girl makes good

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"I hated you in that role!"

This is a comment that actress Tasha Smith hears repeatedly from moviegoers who recognize her. That's because the 37-year-old high-energy actress and former stand-up comedienne puts a lot of her own experiences into her characters--usually streetwise homegirls with plenty of attitude.

In Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married? Smith had marital woes of her own while playing Angela, a no-nonsense Sister who heads to a snowy mountain retreat with her husband and three other married couples. Naturals; sex, lies and drama ensue. "I got [served with] my divorce papers while I was in the make-up trailer on the movie set," recalls the now-divorced Smith. "I think that [the movie] will speak to people and empower people to confront things within their marriages that they may not have wanted to confront."

The film. which also stars Janet Jackson, Jill Scott and Malik Yoba, is Smith's second collaboration with Perry. The director/actor/playwright is just one of Smith's several famous "best friends" that include Tyra Banks and Tisha Campbell-Martin, who all have helped in her career.

Even so, her path to acting was initially a rocky one. She and her identical twin sister, Sidra, grew UP on the tough streets of Camden, N.J., while being reared by their single mother. Smith recalls getting involved with using and selling drugs as a teenager. When she was 19, Smith says a group of her girlfriends staged an intervention and bought her a plane ticket to Los Angeles. She became a stand-up comic and later nabbed a memorable role in Perry's Daddy's Little Girls as the trouble-some baby-mama of hunky Idris Elba's character. "Tyler told me," Smith recalls, "'I have a part for you fight now in the film that I'm working on. You are the voice of this character'. I read the script and I thought, 'But she's a drug dealer. How am I the voice of this person?'"

That role catapulted Smith's acting career. In The Business (a 2008 release), directed by Russ Parr, Smith will play a Hurricane Katrina survivor-turned-prostitute who becomes a Louisiana senator. She also is slated to star in Red Soil, which will focus on enslaved children in the cocoa fields in West Africa. In addition, Smith is proud of her acting studio in Los Angeles, where she teaches in the evenings. "It started off with me developing a place for African-American actors to grow and develop and learn," she says. "Now it's this hot spot for directors and actors."

COPYRIGHT 2007 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning