Written by:
Laurie K. Schenden
Photographer:
Elisa Shebaro
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this Issue of Curve:
Vol. 16#7
Sprawled over a front-row seat in a small downtown theater in Santa Monica, Calif., actor Carlease Burke passes a bag of cookies to the person behind her. She’s “on-book,” casually following the script as two fellow actors rehearse a scene. The play, Dialectics of the Heart , opens in less than two weeks, yet Burke is about as calm and carefree as the tourists strolling down Main Street on this warm winter day.
Then again, after playing opposite Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette in last year’s big-screen hit In Her Shoes and befriending Tom Hanks in The Terminal the year before, what does Burke have to be nervous about?
Rehearsal ends and Burke plops down at a table in the courtyard with her backpack and bike helmet. She lives only a few blocks away, so she rides to rehearsals. With a head of thick cornrows and a solid, nearly 5-foot-9-inch frame, the African-American actor is not hard to notice. She laughingly tells of a man who recently thought he recognized her. “He said, ’You look familiar; do you work for the Department of Rehab?’”
Her commanding presence has won her numerous woman-in-uniform roles, including police officers and authority figures. But in real life, Burke is open, easy going and laughs readily.
Her acting success didn’t happen overnight, but then, neither did coming to terms with her sexuality. “I used to get really turned on by female wrestling!” she says in a confessional tone of voice. “And we’re not talking about women who are hot and gorgeous. [In the 1970s] it wasn’t like glamorous, lipstick lesbian, hot babe wrestling.”
What was a young, church-going, African-American New Yorker who likes girls and loves to perform to do? “I started sneaking around to gay clubs; I’d get all kinds of books and publications. … I loved Playboy. I would fantasize about women — not anybody in particular, just faceless white women with perfect bodies,” she says, laughing. “I didn’t know anything about airbrushing at the time.”
But she did know — or thought she knew — that she didn’t “have the guts to become a lesbian.” Instead, she threw her
energy into acting — with the occasional foray into the basement costume department to make out with another girl.
Her sexuality, however, wasn’t her biggest worry. Her race, and her parents’ opposition to her acting career, posed the primary challenges. Few African-American faces were seen on film or television while she was growing up.
“There was Motown … and this black guy on The Lawrence Welk Show. One black guy!” she says, with humorous
indignation. To appease her parents, she studied pre-law at New York City College, but hung around with performing arts students. Performing “is what I did well and I knew at an early age, but no one else seemed to know it,” she says sarcastically.
Her mother did enroll her in dancing classes, “but that was more to teach me poise and how to be a lady.” She adds with a laugh, “That hasn’t worked.”
Ironically, her parents inadvertently cracked open the stage door by taking her to see Melba Moore in the hit Broadway musical Purlie, based on the segregation comedy Purlie Victorious written by Ossie Davis (he played Bette and Kit Porter’s dad on The L Word). “From that moment I was hooked,” Burke says. “I bought the album and wore the grooves out, singing ’I Got Love’ over and over again.”
The dancing lessons paid off when she got a job singing and dancing on a cruise ship that brought her to the West Coast. Within a few months, she moved to Los Angeles permanently.
Since then, Burke has appeared in dozens of films and television shows, including The Toolbox Murders, The Out-of-Towners and Get Shorty on the big screen; Desperate Housewives, ER, Judging Amy, Malcolm in the Middle, Pizza Hut and Verizon commercials on television; and, of course, the occasional theatrical production.
Her sexuality affected her career only once, she says. “A very shallow stage manager purposely did not include me in an audition. It seems he had a problem with me being out.” While she’s only been cast once as a lesbian, Burke does stand-up comedy and emcee work for Olivia Cruises and emcees an annual Dinah Shore Weekend party in Palm Springs, Calif.
Burke still feels her big break has yet to come, and her ultimate goal is to win an Academy Award. “My smaller, short-term goal is to be a series regular on a great episodic show.”
Like The L Word?
“Yes! Like The L Word. They need more lesbians and women of color,” she insists.
As she collects her things and prepares to leave the courtyard, Burke reflects on what has been the best year yet in her acting life. “I spent a lot of my life trying to figure out where I fit in, trying to find my place. Now it’s, I know who I am, now what fits me?” she explains. “I decided that at this point in my life I don’t want to spend a lot of energy doing something that’s not my No. 1 passion. I don’t know how long I’m going to be on this earth … and I want to keep the momentum [going]. Whatever it is I’m doing, I don’t want to stop.”
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