Sophie Okonedo: Fame, here I come

Her Oscar nomination should mean better job offers. It's about time too, says Kaleem Aftab

Sophie Okonedo was beaming as she walked along the red carpet in an elegant strapless evening gown on her way to the Oscars ceremony last Sunday. She was wide-eyed as she told reporters, "I'm going to start crying, I'm so overwhelmed."

It was the moment of recognition that the actress had almost given up on receiving from the film community. Okonedo screamed in delight when she discovered that she was nominated for best supporting actress for her turn in Hotel Rwanda, while walking with her mother and seven-year-old daughter on Hampstead Heath. Aware that the last black British actress to be nominated for an Oscar, Secrets & Lies star Marianne Jean-Baptiste, had only made one visit to the Academy Awards, Okonedo was determined to enjoy every moment of the occasion.

When the announcement was made that Cate Blanchett had won the Oscar for her role in The Aviator, it was Okonedo who responded with the biggest smile of the night. She seemed pleased just to be rubbing shoulders with Tom Cruise, Clint Eastwood et al.

Okonedo tells me, "I'm glad that I didn't know all about the Oscar fallout before, because I would have been quite nervous. I'm not used to having all this attention." From being relatively unknown, all of a sudden everybody wants a piece of her.

The sudden media attention and newspaper reports about her private life are the downside to the Oscar nomination. The stories have concentrated on her childhood growing up in poverty on north London's Chalkhill estate and the split between her black father and white Jewish mother when Okonedo was five years old.

The actress is now loath to respond to even the most innocent questions that could touch upon her personal life. On whether there was a tension being both black and Jewish, a virile topic in America, especially in Hollywood, she asserts, "I don't want to talk about my childhood. People have been writing all sorts of stuff. I haven't said anything, so let's just talk about the film."

Hotel Rwanda is based on the real-life story of the Hutu Paul Rusesabagina (played by Don Cheadle), manager of the Hotel Mille Collines in Kigali, who gave refuge to 1,200 Tutsis during the Rwandan genocide in the Nineties. His wife, Tatiana, is a Tutsi. The real-life couple currently live in Belgium, and Okonedo spent time with them preparing for the role.

"I went to meet Tatiana a couple of times, although she did not speak English and it was difficult to communicate," says Okonedo. "I gave myself an idea of what it was like to be a Rwandan housewife at that time, pre-genocide. I never spoke to her about the genocide. I sensed that it would be something very painful for her to relive, and I did not want to put her through that."

She supplemented the information gleaned from these visits by reading Fergal Keane's Season of Blood and watching documentary footage that Hotel Rwanda director Terry George had compiled when he visited Rwanda with Paul and Tatiana.

At the beginning of the genocide in 1994, Okonedo was preparing to play Palace in a production of David Beaird's 900 Oneonta at the Old Vic. Little did she know that the events taking place in Rwanda would finally garner her some much-deserved recognition more than a decade later. All Okonedo remembers of the news emanating from Africa is, "reading about the mass exodus of the Hutus and seeing footage of all the refugee camps in Uganda. I certainly didn't have anything near the information that I had when I started researching and reading the script, and I was quite ashamed."

Okonedo's mother, who accompanied the actress to the Baftas and the Oscars, always encouraged her to take an interest in the arts. Initially Okonedo thought that she wanted to be a writer, and a couple of years after leaving school at 16 she went to a workshop at the Royal Court run by The Buddha of Suburbia author Hanif Kureishi. The realisation that acting and not writing was her calling was followed by an application to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. She was awarded a scholarship, and takes pleasure in being able to recount that since graduating she has never had to take another job.

Parts in a series of plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Young Vic and The National Theatre, and appearances on television, endowed Okonedo with a burgeoning reputation among her peers. It was not until 1999, however, and her seditious turn as Cressida in Trevor Nunn's production of Troilus and Cressida, that Okonedo received the critical acclaim to match her talents.

As her public profile was further raised with small-screen appearances on Clocking Off and Whose Baby?, it seemed that Okonedo's career was destined to be as what she tags "a jobbing actress". "I was just happy with what I was doing. I'm much happier doing the stage and TV roles of the calibre that I've been doing in recent years, which I've really been enormously proud of, than doing rubbish films.

"I didn't really try to get a film career. I just carried on doing my thing and somehow managed to land in a film that has been enormously powerful. As for the roles, I don't really care what the genre is, I just want to tell good stories."

With this sweeping statement she tries to deflect attention from the bit parts in dud movies such as This Year's Love and Ace Ventura 2 that she felt compelled to take in order to build a celluloid career. But being taken seriously as a film actress was always going to be tough: apart from Naomie Harris's turn in 28 Days Later, it's hard to think of another meaty role for a black actress in a recent British film. As it was, Okonedo made her own luck by making the most of a secondary role as a caring prostitute in Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things.

"I was so surprised by the reaction to Dirty Pretty Things. It was only a few scenes so I didn't even think that I would be noticed in it," she says. Yet it was from these scenes that some directors began taking an interest, and George decided he wanted to cast her in Hotel Rwanda, despite opposition from the film's financiers.

She has just completed filming the sci-fi thriller Aeon Flux with Charlize Theron. Part of the attraction was that her character's cartoon persona was unlike any other she has done before: "I'm an experimentalist. I'll always experiment to see what I like. It was an experience to learn how to flip and spin in the air; the part was purely physical and it was just what I needed to do after Hotel Rwanda."

This could be the last role for a while in which Okonedo is happy to take second billing, as it seems likely that she is going to use her Oscar success as a launch pad for a film career in America. She's spending the next couple of weeks at home, doing the school run until the right things come along.

Tellingly, she says: "Really, I could not have come into Hollywood in a better way, entering America with a serious, strong film - it is not a glamorous part, playing a mother. I don't have to live up to anything. I've been acting for 15 years and I've had a slow, continuous build. In the last year I've had a huge leap and I'd say that the last few weeks have been another huge leap. I'm certainly more ready for it than if it had happened when I was 20."

'Hotel Rwanda' is on general release