Just like in real life, actress Tracee Ellis Ross plays a married woman with kids on the hit TV show Black-ish. Her character Rainbow is also bi-racial. (Ross is the daughter of Motown legend Diana Ross and music executive Robert Ellis Silberstein.) Black-ish fans will get to meet Rainbow’s hippie parents on March 4, 9:30pm, ABC. Veteran actor Anna Deavere Smith will play her mother Alicia (pronounced Ah-lee-see-ah, not Ai-sha!) and Beau Bridges will play her eco-friendly dad Paul.
Anna Deavere Smith is known by many for her TV roles as National Security Advisor Dr. Nancy McNally in The West Wing, and hospital administrator Gloria Akalitus in Nurse Jackie. She’s also received several prestigious awards for her “documentary theatre” style in plays that she’s written and performed in including Fires in the Mirror, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, and Let Me Down Easy in which she takes on multiple and diverse characters. Smith has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and for two Tonys. She is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship (the “genius award”) and The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (one of the richest prizes in American arts), and received the 2012 National Humanities Medal from President Obama.
