Actor: Angela Bassett

Angela Bassett was nominated for Best Actress for What’s Love Got to Do with It, doing her own singing preparation and building a physical performance that is still cited as a benchmark for musical biography.

She waited nearly thirty years for a second nomination, which came for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and she has been direct about how few opportunities existed in between.

Malcolm X, Waiting to Exhale and Strange Days fill out the earlier work. She trained at Yale and received an honorary Academy Award in 2023.