Well done, Lupita Nyong’o

Of all the acceptance speeches at the Oscars, it was Lupita Nyong’o’s address that rang truest with what the Italians call sprezzatura, the impression of liveliness and spontaneity. “When I look down at this golden statue, may it remind me and every little child that no matter where you’re from, your dreams are valid,” said the Best Supporting Actress winner. The affirmation has since been screencapped, Vined and giffed by the online peanut gallery.

The 31-year-old Kenyan thespian was wise to avoid saying that the recognition left her feeling humbled, as awards ceremonies are precisely designed to do the opposite. She thanked her co-workers in exquisite, understated prose (“Steve McQueen, you charge everything you fashion with a breath of your own spirit”), revealing a depth of character uncommon to Hollywood newcomers and leaving the worldwide audience with a clear impression of her.

That Nyong’o is poised and articulate stems from the fact that she arrived as a fully formed individual, not as a hesitant ingénue. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, which counts Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver among its alumnae, she harbors no delusions about celebrity and appears to have confronted her insecurities early on. “I cannot live in my public image,” she told Dazed & Confused magazine. “It is part of me but it is not me. I have no illusions about it ever being me.”

GROUNDED PERSPECTIVE

Perhaps growing up in an artistic and intellectual family, one with prominent political roots, also contributed to this grounded perspective. Her father Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, now a senator, campaigned for democracy in Nairobi but found himself exiled in Mexico, where Lupita — a diminutive form of Guadalupe — was born in 1983. They hail from the Luo peoples of western Kenya, an ethnic group of which Barack Obama, Sr. was a member. “You are the pride of Africa,” Kenya’s president Uhuru Kenyatta exclaimed on Twitter as he celebrated Nyong’o’s Oscar victory.

Her breakout role in 12 Years A Slave seems worlds away from Fernando Meirelles’ The Constant Gardener, where she served as a production assistant through the help of a friend. Chiwetel Ejiofor may have delivered a powerful but restrained lead performance as Solomon Northup, a free black man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841, but it was her Patsey, Michael Fassbender’s most-prized cotton picker, who stood as a symbol of defiant dignity amid the darkest excesses of the era.

SELF-ASSURED ACTRESS

The popular graphic of her all-the-colors-of-the-rainbow gown choices proves that her confidence on the red carpet has not gone unnoticed. She’s the new face of Miu Miu, something that wouldn’t have been so surprising if it weren’t for one important detail: Prada, older sister to the diffusion line, did not use a single black model in its runway shows between 1993 and 2008.

It was the success of ‘90s South Sudanese supermodel Alek Wek that made Nyong’o comfortable in her own skin. “A celebrated model, she was dark as night, she was on all of the runways and in every magazine and everyone was talking about how beautiful she was,” she said at a recent Black Women in Hollywood luncheon.

As Lupita Nyong’o embarks on her next project, the thriller Non-Stop with Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore, we swoon, some of us a little harder than others. It’s so refreshing to come across such a self-assured young actress, not putty in her director’s hands, and I wish her only the best.

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