Regina Taylor vs. Regina King
Battle of the Stately Reginas

Since we've been running this site, we've observed in many a Fame Audit that black male actors are frequently constrained in their career progress by racist or merely short-sighted casting directors, leaving them to play only cops and criminals. Imagine, then, how much it sucks to be a black female actor. The exception is if you're "lucky" enough to be in the tier of performers who get to play nurses and domestic workers -- but then, that tier is owned by centre square Whoopi Goldberg. Most black women actors climb to the top of their careers playing the wives or girlfriends of more famous black men -- and then they get to graduate to playing cops or criminals themselves, and finally end up playing noble black women role models. Take the case of Halle Berry. She started out (more or less) playing the "mousy," secondary female lead in Boomerang, opposite Eddie Murphy. Then she got to play a recovered crack addict trying to get back the child she gave up for adoption in Losing Isaiah -- a lead, but one that wouldn't, for the purpose of the film, be played by a white woman; her race was part of the point of the movie. Most recently, she was showered with accolades playing Dorothy Dandridge -- one of the most coveted non-white role for young female actors since Frida Kahlo -- in an HBO movie. And then she played Storm in X-Men. (I don't know.)

My point in charting Halle Berry's career path is to say that both Regina Taylor and Regina King are in the Boomerang phase of their careers. And I really don't envy the challenges I'm sure they're facing. They're both superlative actors, in our view, who haven't been given nearly enough room to show what they can do. Does Taylor have comic timing? Would King do well in a period piece? We don't know. So here they are, wondering why every damn part for actors their age seems to be going to Charlize Theron. They're wondering whether they'll be selling out to Hollywood's clichéd notions of black women's lives if they cave and play a hooker (like the older but still great Hazelle Goodman did in Deconstructing Harry) or a drug dealer (as Goodman did in Hannibal) or the head of a crime family (Goodman again, on Homicide: Life on the Street) instead of a medical student (like Aunjanue Ellis in Men of Honor) or a university professor (like Jada Pinkett, pre-Smith, in The Nutty Professor) or some similarly noble and unimpeachable occupation that provides a positive role model for the African-American community. On top of all that, they're wondering which of them is going to be the Regina that goes the distance. Like Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton, it's natural that people are going to confuse Reginas Taylor and King.

So who is going to go the distance? There was a time when this would have been a harder question to answer. Taylor hit the scene first, landing a couple of showy appearances on Law and Order (most notably playing an Anita Hill-esque lawyer who made partner by relenting to her boss's repeated sexual advances) and playing the Calpurnia-esque Lilly on the TV series I'll Fly Away. She did play Anita Hill herself in a TV movie, but on the big screen, her highest-profile roles were as Denzel Washington's wife in Courage Under Fire, and Samuel L. Jackson's wife in The Negotiator -- a backward step on the black actress's path to the A-list.

By contrast, King's got more forward momentum. She grew up on-screen as Brenda, Marla Gibbs's daughter on 227, and then made a graceful transition to films. She starred in John Singleton's first three movies, as well as African-American ensemble pieces like A Thin Line Between Love and Hate and How Stella Got Her Groove Back. She's played the love interest for Cuba Gooding Jr. in Jerry Maguire, Will Smith in Enemy of the State, and -- this week -- Chris Rock in Down to Earth. Do we wish she had a Lilly-esque starring role on her résumé? Sure. But she's staying the course, and we feel confident that she'll get there eventually.

Advantage: King. She gets around.