Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Antonique Smith. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Antonique , appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
I think it’s probably when I played Aretha Franklin’s mother in Genius: Aretha. Aretha was a major influence on me as a singer so to be a part of her legacy is just amazing. But what an honor to give a voice to her mother Barbara Franklin who had a crazy story that not many people knew about. On top of that, Barbara sang and played the piano and was a big reason why Aretha was amazing at both singing and playing the piano. And as an actor, it was so much fun because it was set in the 1940’s, so I got to play this crazy, layered, period piece!
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’m a very proud jersey girl from East Orange, NJ and I have a special needs little sister who is my whole world. I grew up singing in church and my parents, who I’m also very close to, are celebrating 50 years of marriage this year. I’ve been blessed to have been on Broadway RENT, in movies like Notorious and TV shows and I’m a Grammy Nominated singer. There’s nothing else I ever wanted to do. I got into performing without realizing that’s what I was doing, by creating voices and characters on my tape recorder as a kid and doing puppet shows where i’d play all the characters. I was just having fun and enjoyed doing it when no one was watching.
My desire to sing started after I heard Whitney Houston’s voice when I was 5 and a couple years later, I joined the choir at church. I wanted to sound like Whitney so bad that I prayed for God to give me a voice to sing. What a blessing that He answered my prayer.
That’s the foundation of how it all started. At some point, when I was about 12, my dad took me to make my first demo. It was singing in nyc that led to an agent approaching me which led me to getting my first professional acting role in the show 100 Centre Street. The late great Sidney Lumet gave me my start playing a teen drug addict. He told my parents I was an amazing actress with a great career ahead of me.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
I had record labels tell me I sing too good. They felt like I needed to dumb it down and literally sing less good. How crazy is that? So I decided to put my music out independently so that I could sing the way God blessed me to sing and I ended up getting a Grammy Nomination on my very first single. It’s a reminder that not everyone will see the vision or believe in what God created you to do but you must keep moving forward and never give up!!
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
Earlier in life, my mission was to touch hearts and bring joy and healing. Added to that mission since I joined the climate movement over 10 years ago, is to change hearts and inspire action until we end the climate crisis. I don’t want to see another community on fire, another city washed away, another person dying in the street from heat, etc. I want a world full of happy, healthy people. We need to #EndPolluterHandouts and move away from big oil and towards clean energy so that we can have clean air and clean water and a livable planet for future generations.
Contact Info:
Image Credits
Photo credit for the photo in White is Kwaku Alston and the artwork for the single we can credit as “courtesy of Antonique Smith”