Born: 25 May 1972, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Octavia Spencer earned her bachelor’s before embarking on an acting career. Working local casting for movies being filmed in Alabama, she auditioned for one such movie, the John Grisham adaptation A Time to Kill (1996) and landed a small speaking role. Spencer, who was born in 1970, had small film and television roles, with guest appearances on shows like Moesha, ER, and the American version of Ugly Betty, and small parts in films like Being John Malkovich (1999), Big Momma’s House (2000), and Bad Santa (2003). By the end of the 2000s, she had a solid reputation that helped her land her breakout role: Minny Jackson in The Help (2011). Fed up with her racist, belittling employer, Minny, a housemaid, makes her a very … special pie. If you know, you know and if you don’t, I’m not telling—go read the book or watch the movie. For her performance, Spencer won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, and a BAFTA. The film was also incredibly popular, making more than $216 million at the box office, almost ten times its $25 million budget.
In addition to a variety of projects demonstrating her range in everything from dramas to comedies to children’s films, she received acclaim for her performance in 2013’s Fruitvale Station and a second Oscar nomination for playing real-life NASA computer programmer Dorothy Vaughan in Hidden Figures (2016). She earned her third nomination for the 2017 fantasy The Shape of Water. She’s had starring roles as, to name just a few, a superhero (Thunder Force, 2021), a horror film villain (Ma, 2019) and Madam C.J. Walker, one of the U.S.’s first women millionaires (Self Made, 2020).
“Finding fame in my 40s allowed me an adult perspective on my career. I truly understood that you have to enjoy it—and appreciate it,” she told The Guardian in 2018. “My face is still the same, my heart perhaps has changed. It’s more grown up than when I started acting and it doesn’t allow for being put in a box. With time comes experience and you learn that if you don’t break out of those boxes yourself, no one else will allow you to.”