Movies

Class and sass

From Harlem to Beverly Hills to Yale, actress Sanaa Lathan carries a killer combo

By Veronica Chambers

She may not be ready to fill Katharine Hepburn's pumps yet, but Sanaa Lathan is on her way. Since her breakthrough role in 2000 as the feisty tomboy athlete in the romance "Love & Basketball" -- a role akin in spirit to Hepburn's turn as a rebellious debutante in "The Philadelphia Story" -- Lathan has consistently enchanted audiences and impressed critics in a string of films that have portrayed unstereotypical African-American love stories. In 2000, she also starred with Wesley Snipes in "Disappearing Acts", the HBO original movie based on Terry McMillan's best seller.

Now, in "Brown Sugar", her latest big-screen flick, Lathan plays a chic hip-hop magazine editor who slowly realizes she has the hots for a childhood friend (Taye Diggs), now an exec with a record label. The movie has been described as a black "When Harry Met Sally ...", and it's the kind of picture Lathan has deliberately sought out. "I want to be a leading lady," she says, "but I want the roles I choose to really say something about love in our modern life. It's always the question: How do you keep your integrity and stay successful?"

At 29, Lathan epitomizes the same upscale grace and gloves-off gumption that marked Hepburn's illustrious career. Onscreen, she possesses an elegance black actresses today are rarely given the opportunity to show. But that's not to say she's strictly an uptown sophisticate. "People think I'm serious and stuck-up," she says of her reserved nature. "I'm so not. I'm really, really silly. Playful."

Take, for example, the moviegoers who mistake her for the hoops honey she played in "Love & Basketball". Kids routinely challenge her to strut her stuff on the court, asking, "You got game?" Lathan sometimes takes on the challenge. "Most of the time I tell them, 'No, it was just a movie,' " she says, raising a beautifully arched eyebrow. "Sometimes, though, I talk trash, just for the fun of it."

Earlier in the day, Lathan visited an exhibit of the work of Jacob Lawrence, who rose to prominence with his startling portraits of poor family life in Harlem. Decked out in designer clothes at a posh Upper East Side hotel, pouring tea out of a silver pot, Lathan hardly looks as if she might relate. But she spent her childhood moving into and out of privilege. She alternated between parents, living at times with her stage actress mom in Harlem and then with her TV director dad in Los Angeles. There, Lathan -- whose name, pronounced Sah-NAH, is Swahili for "work of art" -- attended Beverly Hills High School (of "90210" fame).

At the University of California, Berkeley, she majored in English and performed in local and campus productions. When she met with a recruiter from the Yale School of Drama, Lathan knew she had to follow what her parents had warned her was a difficult dream. Yale, after all, is where actresses like Angela Bassett and Meryl Streep honed their craft. "When I told my father I wanted to pursue acting, it broke his heart," she says. "As a director, he's on the other side of that audition table. He sees how hard it is."

Yale proved to be the hardest thing she would ever do. She stuck it out, she says, because she was always clear that her goal was to be a great actress, as opposed to a star. Still, the pressure and the politics of Yale almost broke her. "Let me put it this way: When I think of my undergrad days, I remember it in color," she says. "When I think of Yale, I remember it all in black and white."

The drama of drama school is paying off. Today, she's making all the right moves: choosing intriguing roles, developing a rapport with fast-track directors like Malcolm Lee ("The Best Man", "Undercover Brother") and Gina Prince-Bythewood ("Love & Basketball", "Disappearing Acts"), and nurturing her relationships with co-stars. The Hepburn comparison deepens when you realize Lathan already has found her Spencer Tracy in Taye Diggs, with whom she has made three movies. Diggs was an original cast member of the Pulitzer-winning musical "Rent". "There's a matching of wits," Lathan says about her onscreen chemistry with Diggs, whom she first paired up with in 1999 in "The Wood". "Watching him work, he continually surprises me. It's not what you might expect from a young black man in the movies."

Offscreen, she has a different leading man: She's been involved since 1998 with "Love & Basketball" co-star Omar Epps. The two live in L.A., splitting their time between his house and her apartment. They try to travel together when work calls one of them out of town. Epps spent several months in New York with Lathan when she starred with Billy Crudup in a Shakespeare in the Park production of "Measure for Measure".

Nearly midnight on the "Brown Sugar" set, more than 100 nattily dressed hipsters gather in a two-story penthouse that looks out on the New York skyline. Rap bumps from the speakers, and the beautiful people get their groove on, dancing and romancing around a pool. It's a party scene where Lathan's and Diggs' characters run into each other and sparks fly. When the crew breaks to make a technical change and her co-stars retire to their trailer, Lathan is a force in motion: talking to the director about the rigors of a tough night schedule, checking in with the celebrity extras to make sure they are comfortable. "I wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for Sanaa," says hip-hop impresario Russell Simmons, a former business partner of her father's.

His statement speaks to more than the fact that she has friends in high places. It's also that she lives up to her name.

Veronica Chambers' latest book, "Having It All? Black Women and the Question of Success", will be published in January.