A black actress who rose to prominence in the 1990s that I found interesting was Whitney Houston. Houston, who passed away in 2012, is widely known for her music career, and is an American icon. A decade after her death, her legacy is still massively felt and her example influences music to this day. However, I did not know much about her film career until this course's reading informed me. Sure, she appeared in the 1997 cult classic Cinderella, but she also appeared in three other films throughout the 1990s, as well as a posthumous release in 2012.
Houston's most financially successful film, The Bodyguard, showed much promise in Houston's acting career. But by the new millennium, Houston would not have appeared on the silver screen in four years. Whitney Houston was under intense media scrutiny her entire career, but it ramped up in the late 1990s, as the relationship between the media (specifically tabloids) and celebrities rapidly evolved. This would massively impact Houston's mental health, which was considered damning for a black woman in the public eye in the 1990s, and to an extent it still is today. Issues in her public and private life essentially forced her off the screen, a challenge white actresses rarely face. White stars such as Lindsay Lohan would still be subject to scrutiny and experience publicized mental health issues, but they still booked roles. This was not the case for Houston, and it permanently impacted her career, with her not returning to film until the 2010s.