We weren’t prepared for a silent war.”īut Lewis said there has also been great joy throughout her 40-year career. “You lose your friends when you start to get old, that’s the natural process. “We weren’t prepared for that at such a young age,” she said. Revisiting her life for the book was at times painful, she said, particularly when discussing the AIDS crisis that hit Hollywood and Broadway especially hard in the 1980s.

“The elevator to success is broken, so I tell people take the stairs so you can enjoy getting there,” she said. “I was a born entertainer.”īeyond her career, Lewis reveals her struggle with substance abuse, sex addiction and how she manages her bipolar disorder. “I knew my destiny, baby and what I had to do with my life,” she said, laughing. Her memoir traces the actress’s story from the age of five, when she got her first taste of stardom after she wowed during a church solo. The title comes from Lewis’s prolific career in which she’s played the mother of various stars, including rapper Tupac Shakur’s character in the film “Poetic Justice” and Whitney Houston’s in “The Preacher’s Wife.” She currently stars as Anthony Anderson’s mom in the hit ABC comedy “Black-ish.”īut there is much more to Lewis than her film and television fans may know. It’s a lesson the 60-year-old actress has learned well and shares in her new biography “Jenifer Lewis: The Mother of Black Hollywood.”

We gotta live right here, right now and do the best we can.” “The past is gone, the future ain’t here. “The time is now,” the “Black-ish” star told CNN. Jenifer Lewis is in a dropping wisdom kind of mood these days.

The mother of black hollywood