Sanaa Lathan (1971- ) is an American actress. She is best known as the heroine in “Alien vs. Predator” (2004) and as Omar Epps’s girlfriend in “Love and Basketball” (2000). In 2006 she became an important character on the television show “Nip/Tuck”.

“Sanaa” sounds like the beginning of “Sinatra”.

While not yet as good as Halle Berry, she is easily one of the top ten black actresses in Hollywood.

According to this blog she is the seventh most beautiful woman in the world. I saw her in “Disappearing Acts” (2000) and could not take my eyes off her. Looking at her is like eating ice cream on a hot summer day.

And I am not alone. Ebony magazine says she has a “timeless look” and put her in their “55 Most Beautiful People”. Even white-boy Maxim once put her in their “Hot 100″.

She has not just beauty but also brains (degrees from Berkeley and Yale), talent and a great deal of patience and faith. Her grace and strength has been compared to Katherine Hepburn. She puts her whole self into whatever she does.

She is from New York. She grew up in Harlem and Beverly Hills in a show business family. Her mother danced on Broadway in “The Wiz” and her father directed television shows for PBS and others. She grew up dancing and hanging out at the theatre.

But she knew better than most that to succeed in show business is hard, that talent is not always rewarded. She also saw how entertainers are not respected. So she wanted to go into law. But then Yale talked her into coming there to study acting, as Angela Bassett and Meryl Streep had done before her.

Yale was hard, but by then she knew she was meant to be an actress. When she told her father, it broke his heart.

In the 1990s she tried to make it on Broadway but failed. Her father asked her to try Hollywood instead. She did. She got bit parts on some television shows – once she even tormented Urkel on “Family Matters”. She landed regular parts on two shows, both short-lived. But by then she was getting parts in films.

At last she made her name as a serious actress in 2000 in “Love and Basketball”. She has since appeared on Broadway and continues to do television too.

She likes film, but her true love is theatre where she has a live audience.

You do not see her in many films. She wants to be a great actress, not a famous one. So she chooses her parts with great care. She knows that films are forever, that her grandchildren will see them.

She also knows that her work affects how people see black women. That is why, for example, she appears in “Alien vs Predator”: the last one standing is a black woman. And why she plays the evil Michelle Landau on “Nip/Tuck”: rarely on American television has a black woman been so important to white men.

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