“We ’d walk down the street together wearing beads and cornrows. “She started experimenting with African hairstyles long before anyone else did, ” Joie told Rosen and Hutchings. Jackie, from whom Joie says she got her acting style, taught black pride to the Lee children. Joie ’s father, Bill, was a noted jazz trumpeter and composer -(he wrote the score for Mo ’ Better Blues -while her mother, Jackie, was a teacher in an exclusive private school. The Lee children -four boys and one girl -were “exposed early to the arts and ideas of black culture - everything from Broadway musical theater to the writings of the abolitionist Harriet Tubman, ” reported Rosen and Hutchings. ” As a youth in Brooklyn, Joie was brought up in an environment that encouraged artistic development and independence. Indigo is very soft-spoken, and I can get loud. I was raised so that things should be evenly distributed. Joie noted to Marjorie Rosen and David Hutchings in People the differences between her and Indigo.
“Hopelessly in love, but pragmatic about the prospects of convincing Gilliam to settle down, she succeeds in bringing a genuine touch of lightness to the over –bearing gloom that pervades the movie.
“Lee lights up the screen with her sassy portrayal of the devoted Downes, ” wrote Victor Dwyer in Maclean ’s. She had her most major role in the 1990 film Mo ’Better Blues, where she played Indigo Downes, the long-suffering girlfriend of an unscrupulous jazz musician played by Denzel Washington. ” Joie has received positive notices for her film performances. Joie ’s acting style has been described as natural and refreshing Webb calls her “the Gechee woman in a head-on collision with the fly-girl. … She is the eternal incarnation of the good girl. Veronica Webb explained in Spin : “Joie ’s work with her brother, who is fast becoming the pope of polemics in American cinema, seems to take on the role of the benevolent black Madonna that inhabits her brother ’s imagination. In Spike ’s films - which critics have praised as stirring depictions of contemporary black society -Joie regularly portrays characters who represent a voice of conscience. Joie Lee first became familiar to filmgoers in her brother Spike Lee ’s hit 1986 movie, She ’s Gotta Have It, and has since appeared in three other of his acclaimed films.
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