Gloria Foster - Acting Career

Acting Career

Gloria Foster began her career on Broadway as she moved to New York in 1963. Her first role was Ruth in the show of A Raisin in the Sun. She started an acting career as her agent, Ernestine McClendon, sent her on an audition for In White America. The play was about the history of blacks in the United States and the oppression they had to face. Gloria Foster, “play a 13-year-old Arkansas girl who tries to enter her Little Rock school”. This was her first distinction and had to play 27 different characters. This led to her winning an Obie Award or Off-Broadway Theater Award, which is an, “annual award bested by The Village Voice newspaper to theater artists and groups in New York City". She also received a two-page article in Life Magazine, explaining about the wonderful performance and critics said she was up and coming and people should look out for the next pieces she performs in. She performed many other plays in New York and on Broadway and the public started to notice her, as she became a bigger star. Not only did the public start to notice her, but also critics began analyzing her performances. They wrote that she performed her roles as a, “majestic, full-voiced, statuesque and stunning actress”. The passion she had for acting was reflected in her performances and an unusual thing happened for her, “an African-American actress around whom producers and directors built production”. Instead of Gloria Foster having to audition for roles, people started to make parts for her to be in. It was her spirit, excitement, and stamina for acting that gave her success in such a hard business. She was a breakthrough artist who, “played roles previously inaccessible to Blacks”.

Gloria Foster, instead of searching for fame by trying to be in many different productions, searched for roles in which she would be able to perform at the best of her ability. She once said, “Young people today, I think, are thinking in terms of stepping stones…I don’t know that I ever thought that way. It sounds ridiculous, but I was always thinking in terms of a more difficult role”. She won fame by performing her roles magnificently, not by performing the maximum number of roles that she could. She read many scripts, but only chose the ones that spoke truly to her. By the end of her acting career, she was rewarded with three Obie awards, for In White America (1963) and A Raisin In the Sun, and was in the Broadway production of Having Our Say (1995) (McCann 121).

In the early '70s, she was admitted to a special graduate program in education at UMass.