Every Day Is Special: May 25 - Happy Birthday, Octavia Spencer!

May 25 - Happy Birthday, Octavia Spencer!

Posted on May 25, 2019

Today's famous birthday has won loads of important awards for acting - and she's also an author and producer!

Octavia Spencer was born in Alabama on this date in 1972.

Spencer has SIX brothers and sisters! Wow, that's a lot these days!

Spencer's father died when she was just 13 years old. Her mother worked as a maid. I'm going to go out on a limb here and make a guess that the family wasn't super wealthy.

I'm also guessing that there aren't all that many movies shot in Alabama, but one that was is a Whoopi Goldberg movie called The Long Walk Home. It was about the Montgomery (Alabama) Bus Boycott.

An older teenager at the time that movie was being shot, Spencer was able to work as an intern on the set. She later said that Whoopi Goldberg helped her realize that she wanted to "go for it" and try to get into "the biz" - but Goldberg also recommended that Spencer finish college first.

After graduating from college, Spencer moved to Los Angeles, and she was hired to work on casting of a movie. She was bold enough to ask the director if she could audition for a part. She got the part, playing a nurse in the movie A Time to Kill. Soon she was playing roles in a variety of movies and TV shows. She even earned praise as one of the funniest female actors in the entertainment industry.

One of Spencer's award-winning roles was funny - but also serious. She played a maid in The Help, a movie about the racism faced by black maids, cooks, and other domestic workers who were regarded as "the help" by families who hired them.

Another award-winning role was serious - but also a bit funny, because Spencer does that so well! - as Spencer played Dorothy Vaughan, a mathematician and human computer who worked for NASA during the Space Race. That film was called Hidden Figures - because the fact that so many women, especially so many black women, were super crucial to the U.S. conquest of space was kept almost completely under wraps.

Everyone you saw and heard from on TV - astronauts on the flights, engineers in the control room, and so on - was white and male. I suppose if people like me had thought at all about it, we would have guessed that some women and people of color were hired by NASA to clean up stuff - but a room full of black women doing absolutely crucial stuff like computing flight trajectories, identifying design flaws, and suggesting solutions to math-oriented problems! I had no idea!!

These are some of the real human computers of NASA.
Note that white women worked for the space agency,
too, but for a while at least they worked in
segregated groups.

By the way, Spencer bought out a theater for a screening of Hidden Figures for low-income families to enjoy on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. How awesome is that?

I already mentioned you that Octavia Spencer was a producer and author as well as an actor. She was an executive producer of the Academy-Award-winning film Green Book, which tackles racism but ended up being super controversial. Critics say that the film mostly discounts Dr. Donald Shirley, the talented black musician the film follows, getting his story wrong in several big-time ways, and mostly celebrates the white man hired to drive Dr. Shirley as some sort of white savior, when he was really just a racist white man who grew to grudgingly accept his employer as an exception to his racist views.

Octavia Spencer was apparently brought onto the project to weigh in on it from the point of view of a black person, and she accomplished the hard tasks of answering critical questions about the movie. I admire her grit and grace in how she accomplished this, although I hope she is able to produce movies with better messages in the future.

As to being an author, Spencer is doing a wonderful thing: she is writing an entire series of books for children about Randi Rhodes, Ninja Detective - and that's pretty great!