Brooks, Golden

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Golden Brooks

1970—

Actress

As one of the lead characters on the hit television show Girlfriends, which debuted in 2000, Golden Brooks has become one of the most recognized faces in the country. After eight seasons playing the character of Maya Wilkes, she has also begun to find fame on the big screen, garnering a steady stream of film roles including the 2008 release, A Good Man is Hard to Find, which she described to AOL's Black Voices as "one of those things that you wait your whole life as an actress." Her success is a testament to not only her talent, but her tenacity. Just out of high school, she auditioned for a play at Fresno City College. The director, not impressed, told her that she was no actress. Instead of giving up, Brooks, known for her positive personality, persevered. "I am glad he said that to me," she told the Fresno Bee in 2002. "To this day, I have not forgotten that. It pushes me."

Golden Ameda Brooks was born in Fresno, California, on December 1, 1970, a month premature and weighing only three pounds. Her earliest days were a struggle just to survive. "She has always been a fighter," her father Walter Brooks told the Fresno Bee. "No matter what she has done, she has always been very, very determined. I sure wouldn't want to go to war with her." When she was two, her father moved the family to Lagos, Nigeria, where he worked briefly as a teacher. Upon returning to California, her parents divorced and Brooks and her brother went to live with their mother Barbara in San Francisco. They later moved to Los Angeles during Brooks' high school years.

Independence and personal growth were a constant in their household. "My mother gave my brother and me so much independence to discover and explore and I think because of that, it kept me open," Brooks told Jet. "I could go in any room and talk to anyone. Whether it is the president of the United States or a room of angry right-wing conservatives or Southern White people, I have that ability to blend in and assimilate." Her mother also encouraged Brooks to express herself through sports and the arts. She excelled in gymnastics, figure skating, and theater, but it was dance that was her true love. "I was a dancer in high school. I did ballet, modern, jazz," she told the Fresno Bee. "After high school, all I wanted to do was dance." However, after a disappointing stint with a dance company, she decided to pursue college instead.

Brooks attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she majored in sociology and did research on media representations of minorities. She also spent more and more time in the theater, appearing in university productions of Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls, Anton Chekov's The Brute, and William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. After graduating in 1994, Brooks moved to New York where she earned a master's degree in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She also further immersed herself in theater both on stage and in theoretical classes. "Theatre is the core where acting comes from, just like blues and jazz is the core where all music stems from," she told Back Stage West. "For me theatre has been the foundation of my training."

Returning to California in the late 1990s, Brooks continued to work on stage, becoming an active mem- ber of the Robey Theater Company, a non-profit theater that promotes black performances, both experimental and established. There, she shared the stage with Danny Glover. In 1998, Brooks made the leap to television when she landed a co-starring role alongside Pam Grier on the Showtime cable sitcom, Linc's. Based in a Washington D.C. bar owned by a black Republican, the show dealt with issues of politics, race, and sex all under the guise of comedy. Though it garnered several awards nominations and a fair amount of critical acclaim, the show was cancelled after just two seasons. Brooks told Men's Magazine Online, "My character was the only one people related to—the hard-working girl, single mother, living check to check. It caught people off guard. Middle America wasn't ready for those ramifications. It scared people."

Brooks didn't stay unemployed long. In 2000, she landed the role of Maya Wilkes on the UPN (now The New CW) show Girlfriends. Based on the lives of four female friends as they navigate life and love in Los Angeles, the show became a smash hit, running for an impressive eight seasons—the network's longest-running sitcom. Brooks attributed the show's success to keeping it real. "We keep the information accessible and the characters honest," she told Men's Magazine Online. "All are flawed and humbled. They make mistakes that don't get cleared up in 24 minutes." Brooks plays a sassy, brassy girl from the ghetto made good. Brooks told The Fresno Bee, "I'm a lot like Maya in the sense of Maya is very comfortable in her skin. She is very outspoken, very family-oriented, very grounded and a very strong person," Brooks says. The role earned Brooks a Multi-Cultural Prism Award for Best Actress in a Comedy and a BET Comedy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. Her high profile also landed her several guest appearances on shows such as Moesha, The Jamie Foxx Show, The Parkers, and Star Trek: Enterprise.

As her small screen stature grew, Brooks slowly made ascended in stature on the silver screen. After appearing in bit parts in several forgettable films in the early 2000s, Brooks landed a major role in the 2005 Queen Latifah film Beauty Shop. Alongside Alicia Silverstone, Andie MacDowell, and Alfre Woodard, Brooks held her own as the saucy stylist named Chanel. She followed that film a year later with a part in Something New, a sophisticated comedy about a professional black woman dating a sexy white landscaper. Next, she landed a role as one of three leads in the film A Good Man Is Hard to Find, based on the gospel play of the same name. However, even as these films raised her celebrity, Brooks still found it hard to find what she called the "right roles." "It's very competitive to land those few roles that come along," she told the Oakland Tribune. "I thought that after Halle Berry won the Oscar for Monster's Ball that things were changing. The roles are getting better, but there's just a lack of them." She then added with characteristic optimism, "But I'm still encouraged." Her growing legion of fans are as well.

Selected works

Films

Hell's Kitchen, 1998.

Timecode, 2000.

Impostor, 2002.

Motives, 2004.

Beauty Shop, 2005.

Something New, 2006.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find, 2008.

Television

Linc's, 1998.

Girlfriends, 2000-07.

At a Glance …

Born on December 1, 1970, in Fresno, CA. Education: University of California Berkeley, BA, sociology, 1994; Sarah Lawrence College, MA, creative writing.

Career: actress, 1990s-; Robey Theater Company, CA, member, 1990s-.

Awards: Multi-Cultural Prism Award, for Best Actress in a Comedy, 2003; BET Comedy Award, for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, 2006.

Addresses: Agent—Nine Yards Entertainment, 8530 Wilshire Blvd., 5th fl, Beverly Hills, CA, 90211.