Givens, Robin 1965–

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Robin Givens 1965–

Actress

Gained Acclaim for Television and Film Performances

Actress Robin Givens has played a wide range of characters during her career, from a struggling ghetto dweller to a savvy corporate executive. A similar diversity marked the roles she took during the months of intense publicity surrounding her marriage to former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson. When their relationship began, Givens was frequently portrayed either as the cultured beauty in love with the street-hardened beast, or the ambitious starlet eager to ride his coattails to fame. When Givens sought divorce, alleging that Tyson had physically abused her, she was reviled in many media reports as a liar and a gold digger. In the aftermath of their marriage and Tyson’s later conviction for raping another woman, Givens has emerged as a courageous survivor. In her own eyes, the actress told an Ebony correspondent, she is simply a hard-working actress, “a good human being and incredibly sensitive and vulnerable.”

Prior to her liaison with Tyson, Givens was known primarily for her work in the ABC-TV situation comedy Head of the Class. She played the part of Darlene, a student who embodied intelligence, beauty, and a snobby attitude. In some ways, the character’s background was similar to that of Givens. Raised by her mother after her parents divorced when she was two years old, Givens attended exclusive private schools in New Rochelle, New York. On weekends, she took lessons in music, dance, and theater arts. This special schooling, along with her natural good looks, helped her to secure modeling jobs and small acting parts while still in her teens. She excelled academically as well and entered the prestigious Sarah Lawrence College when she was 15.

Givens’s years at Sarah Lawrence were marked by personal frictions as well as academic achievement. One of her classmates, Holly Robinson—who went on to star in the television series 21 Jump Street —once knocked Givens down in retaliation for remarks Givens made about Robinson and her mother. The ensuing fight had to be broken up by a resident assistant at the dormitory. Another classmate, business-woman Kimberly Alexander, was quoted in Sports Illustrated as saying that while she never clashed personally with Givens, “Robin didn’t have any friends at Sarah Lawrence. She made her presence known, but she rubbed everybody the wrong way. At our graduation, they called her name and she was booed.”

Personal difficulties aside, Givens’s performance at Sarah

At a Glance…

Born in 1965 in New York; daughter of Reuben Givens (an artist) and Ruth Roper (a business executive); married Michael Tyson (a boxer), February 7, 1988 (divorced, February 14, 1989). Religion: Catholic. Education: Sarah Lawrence College, B.A., 1984; post-graduate study at Harvard University.

Actress appearing in television series, including Head of the Class and Angel Street, 1992; in television films, including The Penthouse and The Women of Brewster Place, both 1989; and in motion pictures, including A Rage in Harlem, 1991, and Boomerang, 1992. Founder of Never Blue Productions.

Addresses: Home —Los Angeles, CA. Studio —c/o CBS-TV, 51 West 52nd St., New York, NY 10019.

Lawrence was good enough to earn her admission at Harvard University’s graduate school. She enrolled in 1984 with the intention of taking premed courses but dropped out before a year had passed to pursue a full-time acting career. By 1986 she was a familiar figure to American television viewers for her featured role in Head of the Class, a comedy about gifted high school students. Further attention came her way when she began dating such high-profile celebrities as comedian and actor Eddie Murphy and Chicago Bulls basketball star Michael Jordan. Tyson, the boxing champion who had spent much of his youth in reform school, was smitten with Givens the first time he saw her on television and attempted for the next four months to arrange a date with her.

“I was too scared to meet him,” Givens was quoted as saying in People. When she finally gave in and met him for dinner in March of 1987, she brought along her mother, her sister, and two publicists. By May of that year she “was very much in love,” although in hindsight she confessed, “I should have known about his violent nature the first time he took me to his apartment.... He just picked me up and carried me to 41st Street, where he lived. I didn’t want to go.... When I wanted to leave, Michael hit me in the back of the head. It felt like my head would come off.”

Despite such ominous warning signs, Givens continued to date Tyson. In November of 1987 Tyson gave some of his views on their relationship to the London Sun. The interview was later quoted by Sports illustrated: “She has wanted me to marry her for a long time but I ain’t going to do it.... We fight all the time. She thinks she is so much better than me, just because she has had an education.... It may be true, but I hate the way she goes about telling me. I retaliate by telling her I am the heavyweight champion and she should know her place. Man, she really gets into a temper at that and comes at me. She knows she can’t hurt me if she kicks me in the head so she tries to kick me in the groin.”

Embarked on a Rocky Marriage With Tyson

Tyson and Givens had a spur-of-the-moment wedding on February 7, 1988, repeating their vows two days later after obtaining a marriage license. Cynics immediately pointed out that no prenuptial agreement had been signed, and that Tyson was worth an estimated $50 million. “I feel sorry for Mike Tyson because I hear he’s a really nice guy,” one of Givens’s former classmates was quoted as saying in People. Her statement reflected the common perception that Tyson was the victim, and Givens the predator. “Our agreement is never to get divorced,” Givens explained in the same magazine. “Michael said if I ever divorced him, he’d kill me.” She added: “He’s really just a huge teddy bear.”

Over the next few months Givens continued to discuss her marriage in glowing terms, even extending that enthusiasm to the relationship between her husband and her mother, Ruth Roper. In May she announced that she was pregnant, but suffered a miscarriage the following month. Strange stories then began to surface: Tyson ran his car into two parked automobiles, reportedly because Givens was hitting him; he ran another car into a tree in an alleged suicide attempt; and he struck both Givens and her friend, pro tennis player Lori McNeil, while vacationing in the Bahamas. Givens’s detractors suggested that she and her mother had provoked the incidents in order to set the scene for a favorable divorce settlement, but Givens continued to profess her love for the fighter.

In September of 1988, just seven months after their marriage, the couple appeared on the television program 20/20 in an interview segment with Barbara Walters. By that time, Givens had publicly stated that her husband was manic-depressive and that he had physically abused her. She repeated those allegations on 20/20 and, according to Newsweek, described her marriage as “torture, pure hell, worse than anything I could imagine.” Meanwhile, Tyson sat passively alongside her, under the influence of the powerful antipsychotic drugs lithium and Thorazine. Two weeks later, Givens claimed she was awakened by Tyson striking her about the head and body. She fled their mansion and filed for divorce soon thereafter.

Tyson unsuccessfully attempted to have the marriage annulled. In his annulment petition, he accused his wife of coercing him into marriage by pretending to be pregnant. In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times later quoted in Ebony, he stated that Givens and her family “don’t like or respect Black people. They want to be White so bad. The way they talk about Black people you’d think you were living with the Ku Klux Klan.... Not only did she want to take my money, but she wanted to ruin me, embarrass me, take my manhood and humiliate me on television so that no woman would ever want me again, and that was evil.” The end result of all the mudslinging, suits, and countersuits was a divorce in February of 1989 and a seven-figure financial settlement for Givens.

Gained Acclaim for Television and Film Performances

For nearly a year after the divorce, Givens kept a low profile. Two television movies she had already filmed— The Penthouse and Oprah Winfrey’s critically acclaimed Women of Brewster Place —were broadcast. Givens was included in the general praise for Brewster Place, which chronicled the lives of a group of black women living in an urban housing project and their struggle to maintain personal dignity. In March of 1990, when she granted a lengthy interview to Ebony, Givens was portrayed much more sympathetically than she previously had been. The actress described herself as being more mature and spiritual in the wake of the divorce and professed to be friendly with Tyson again. “If she is acting, she’s doing a world-class job,” noted writer Lynn Randolph. “There’s an emotional depth that rings true and something in her eyes says this is not a performance.”

In 1991 Givens appeared in her first feature film, A Rage in Harlem.In this adaptation of a Chester Himes novel, she played Imabelle, a loose woman who falls for a pious young accountant and is forced to choose between a trunk of gold and her penniless new love. Givens more than held her own alongside costars Danny Glover and Gregory Hines, according to many reviewers. Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers singled her out as the only player to capture the spirit of Himes’s novel, and praised her for adding “dimension and true grit to a film all too eager to settle for being a slick Hollywood package.”

In 1992 Givens could be seen in the short-lived television series Angel Street —which featured two female homicide detectives fighting crime in a deteriorating city—as well as in the film Boomerang. She had a supporting role in Boomerang, which starred Eddie Murphy as a heartless playboy who more than meets his match in Givens’s character, Jacqueline. Reviewers praised Givens for her deft portrayal of a high-powered executive who embodies stereotypically male attitudes toward sex, sports, and business.

Formed Production Company

In an article she contributed to Ebony, Givens commented at length on the paucity of parts available to black actresses and her determination to expand the number of roles for African American women. To this end, she formed her own production company, Never Blue Productions. “As a young actress in Hollywood,” she wrote, “I hope that some little girl looks at me and says: ’She’s doing it. I can do it.’ Often that possibility is what keeps me going when I’m tired and frustrated, when I feel like the injustices of the world have taken their toll on me. If I don’t do my part, then the dream has died.”