Life has been good lately to actress Ella Joyce.
Last fall she was nominated for a NAACP Image Award for her role as Eleanor on the Fox-TV comedy “Roc,” and she has been invited to be included in the recent edition of Who’s Who in Black America.
“My parents are in a daze,” she says with a smile, “very happy and excited for me, but kind of `Who would ever have thought that our skinny little girl who went to Catholic school would have become a television star?’ “
The route to stardom hasn’t been an easy one for Joyce. She has suffered years of pavement pounding, casting-couch showdowns and rejection because she was a black woman who was either too dark or too light.
Her looks, she says, have been “a problem, period. Talented, good-looking black women catch hell! Many times I’ve been told I’m `too pretty for the part.’ I don’t see that that should be held against me. I’m a fine actress, and that sort of thing is never held against a white actress. When you get that sort of feedback from more than one source, you know that it’s an industry problem, it’s not just one person with narrow vision.
“An upcoming black director says I was `too light-skinned,’ which was an even bigger insult.
“It does hurt very much,” she says quietly.
Yet through it all, Joyce never swerved from her ambition to act.
“Even as a kid I was told that I was a natural-born entertainer. I loved making people laugh. Then I fell in love with theater and making literary material come to life. I guess it was always in me.”
Joyce, who refuses to reveal her age, talked about her career during a recent interview in a Hollywood hotel, soon after hearing that “Roc” had been picked up for another season. The comedy show follows the life of a garbage collector, Roc, and his nurse wife, Eleanor, who share their home with his father, and musician brother. This season she is pregnant and the teenage daughter of a friend who is in prison comes to live with them.
Was she surprised when “Roc” was picked up?
“No, this show has been such a hit, especially with African-Americans. It was the first major black show in the Fox network, and this year Fox is producing its sixth black show. This was a real breakthrough.
“Black women constantly come up to me and tell me the characters on `Roc’ are characters they can relate to. Television traditionally puts a gauze on everything to soften it, making things the way we’d like to see them. But there’s an audience out there who would like to see scenes closer to reality, keeping the humor and combining reality and escapism.
Although “Roc” is a comedy, Joyce speaks thoughtfully about the role of Eleanor in relation to other images of African-American women, which is a concern of hers.
“We’re so diverse in real life, but people are used to seeing us in servant parts or in jolly character parts,” she says. “The character of Clare Huxtable on `The Cosby Show’ can’t represent all African-American women, even professional African-American women. My character can’t represent all blue-collar black women. The problem is that they haven’t been portrayed.
“When we see Eleanor, we haven’t seen many soul-sister types like her. We haven’t seen enough images of sophisticated, well-bred women like the character Clare Huxtable. Yet we saw that type of woman in Anita Hill. The country wasn’t used to seeing a woman like her, a well-bred, articulate, grounded, Christian black woman.”
Joyce admits she based a lot of Eleanor on her own mother and claims the show reflects a lot of her own values.
“Many parents weren’t Ozzie and Harriet,” she says, “but they were good, solid, hard-working people. We have a real strong legacy in my family of women who support their men. My father was a modern-day hero, you know, going out to work hard every day to keep a roof over our heads. They gave me a good strong example of security in a relationship and in a marriage.”
Her mother is a beautician, and her father works for General Motors in her native Detroit.
“I could have been a secretary at a motor company,” Joyce says. “I mean, the pragmatic side of me always said-`Hey, it’s hard out there for a black woman!’ “
She did bow to a certain pragmatism, however. After she graduated from Cass Technical High School (which also produced Diana Ross and Lily Tomlin) she did qualify as a legal word-processor.
“I realized when I got out of school that I needed something to earn money to keep me going while I knocked on people’s doors. You can be trained and trained and trained as a performer and it doesn’t guarantee you anything.
“I decided that if I was going to be a secretary I was going to be a pretty good one so that I could get my pick of the jobs and work when I wanted to. I worked until midnight so I could knock on the doors of the casting offices during the day. It was a hard time getting this far.”
The same pragmatism shows when she recalls some of her earlier experiences in the business.
“I’ve had my casting-couch days, when I had to stand up and say no. And it’s infuriating when people play those games and sabotage your auditions. If you won’t go to bed with them, you’re not right for the part. It’s a control thing.
“I`ve been to Actors Equity and made complaints and filed charges,” she says. “Well, you do what you can.
“They commended me, but still nothing really gets done. They are back doing the same old thing, and you’re black-balled from working in the particular area where that person has the power. I just try to say that something good comes out of something bad. You just have to move on.”
Joyce moved on through an impressive variety of theater work in New York, Boston, Seattle and San Diego. She is grateful for her theater background: “If the money doesn’t last, if television and movies don’t work out, I can always get back up on stage.
“I think theater is what gives actors their longevity in the business. Actors like (Laurence) Fishburne and Denzel Washington have paid their dues in the theater. Even when they have achieved stardom and they seem to have rushed out of nowhere, they have put in their time.”
It was in the theater that Joyce first met her husband of four years, actor/producer Dan Martin. “People say when I talk about him I look as though I’m in love,” she says. “It’s because it’s a very, very good marriage and a very, very strong relationship. I can see us in time becoming a sort of Demi Moore/Bruce Willis team. I`d like to see that happen.”
She laughs affectionately at the memory of the time they met.
“I’d just got back from a gig in Washington, which was the biggest thing I’d done at that time, and I was really impressed with him. He was doing all kinds of work and working as an extra in films-and getting paid! I thought `Wow! You`re a real working actor’ “
Joyce is a realist and knows that the track record for marriages in show business is poor, but she is confident that she and Martin will succeed where others have failed.
“Marriages in our business have a tendency not to work out because they are not based on what they should be based on. I’ve been lucky to find someone who’s not intimidated when I’m successful. Instead of competing with one another, we help one another. In fact, I’m still trying to cope with adulation myself. It’s fun, but it can wear you out. I handle it by trying to stay grounded and by trying not to lose touch with where the adulation is coming from.”
“Let’s face it,” she says, “people don’t necessarily admire you, they’ve just fallen in love with your character. It’s enjoyable to me to hide behind a character. My husband says I’m all these different women and he never knows who he’s waking up with.”
The couple have no children, but Joyce looks up from under her lashes and says, “We kind of kick the idea back and forth.”
If they do have children, who would she like to see as their role models?
“That is hard,” she says, laughing. “If I had a girl I’d like her to look up to women who have accomplished great things-women who have made a difference in the world, in politics or some other sphere. If I had boys, and it’s a man’s world, I`d like them to look up to their father. I think Dan would make a wonderful father. He’s a strong black man, and very intelligent. He got through school and got a master’s degree when he came from the same sort of blue-collar background I came from. It’s hard if you come from no money, and it takes special people to make things happen.”
Asked whether she is militant about rights for blacks and women, Joyce takes her time before replying.
“I think I’m just contemporary. The people we have in the White House now, they’re much more representative of the sort of progressive thinking we need. Hey, I’d vote for Hillary Clinton in a minute if she decided to run for president.
“I’d like to see more women take charge. It doesn’t matter what color they are, long as they’re American. Times are changing faster than the Good Old Boys expected.
“But,” she says briskly, “they’re going to have to get over it. A woman is the head of our national health-care concerns, and I think that’s the way it ought to be. Woman is the Earth mother, the nurturer.”
When it comes to the Year of the Woman, Joyce makes an expressive gesture and exclaims:
“It’s the decade of the woman! We’re going to take the decade, and we’re going to take the next century. We’re tired of being like kids left on the outside with our noses pressed against the window, crying, `Let us in, let us in.’ It’s about time that Hollywood movies, which are meant to document our times, reflected that.”
Joyce’s two pet projects might address the imbalance.
“I would love to film the story of Assata Shakur,” she says. “She was a political activist who escaped in the ’60s from America to Cuba. And Rosa Parks, her life story, not just her becoming the mother of the civil rights movement, but what she was like as a little girl. This woman is still alive, she’s a national treasure and it’s important that we document someone like her while she’s still alive. To see that she was just an ordinary, shy woman who just got tired one day.”
Until Joyce and her husband can put these and other projects together, they are developing their professional lives from their home in Los Angeles.
Joyce admits to three leisure luxuries-horror films and horror stories (“I’m a horror fan, a fanatic; I’ve read everything Stephen King has ever written”), shopping and her greatest personal extravagance-bathing.
“I`m really heavily into aromatherapy, and I love different types of baths: creamy milk baths, soothing blue baths, scented ocean mist baths, peppermint baths, juniper berry. I love that kind of stuff. I take a bath every morning and a candle-lit bath every evening.
“My husband has got to the point where he says `So, honey, what color bath are we taking tonight.’ “
