The trio of US President Barak Obama, leading actor Chiwetel and
UK’s fast rising member of parliament Chuka Umunna is not just that they
are blacks, of African parentage but that all have death robbing them
of their fathers in Africa early in their lives.
Here are their little bios:
Obama:
Late on a November evening in 1982, Obama [Sr.] was driving home when he rammed his white pickup truck headlong into the high stump of a eucalyptus tree at the side of the road and died instantly. He was forty six.
Obama’s eight children, some of whom had not seen him for years, largely closed the door on the subject of their father. For better or worse, the Old Man was gone.
A quarter-century later another Barack Obama emerged, this one a cerebral U.S. Senator from Chicago who was angling, quixotically it seemed, for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. presidency. As that heavily laden name dominated the headlines and the nightly news, it triggered a flood of complex emotions among some of the elder Obama’s children.
Chiwetel
The actor’s convincing breakthrough performance as a Nigerian doctor/illegal immigrant in the 2002 British drama Dirty Pretty Things can be attributed to the fact that he based it on his own physician father. Unfortunately, his real-life dad died in a tragic car accident that also left the then-11-year-old Ejiofor with a prominent scar on his forehead. Despite this tragedy, Ejiofor pursued his performing dreams and made an auspicious big-screen debut at age 20 in Steven Spielberg’s 1997 slave drama Amistad. The theater-trained actor spent the next few years on the English stage, racking up rave reviews, notably for his Olivier-nominated turn as a schizophrenic in Blue/Orange, which also netted him a Jack Tinker Award for Most Promising Newcomer. Although Dirty Pretty Things established him as a formidable screen presence that led to a slew of work in auteur-helmed films (Spike Lee’s She Hate Me and Inside Man, Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda, John Singleton’s Four Brothers), Ejiofor earned a pair of Golden Globe nominations in 2007 for contrasting roles as Lola, a singing drag queen with a penchant for fancy footwear in the feature Kinky Boots, and in the TV-movie Tsunami: The Aftermath, playing a dad desperately searching for his missing daughter. Heading back to the London stage in 2007, he won the Laurence Olivier award for best actor playing the lead role in Othello. Continuing to excel in a variety of genres, he starred in Roland Emmerich’s 2009 end-of-the world action flick 2012, and played a CIA agent opposite Angelina Jolie in 2010’s spy thriller Salt.
Osi Umunna
The father of a Labour frontbencher who is tipped as a future party leader died in a mysterious car crash that friends fear was a political assassination.
Bennett Umunna, whose son Chuka is Labour’s business spokesman and MP for Streatham, was killed in Nigeria shortly after standing for state governor.
Although Mr Umunna – a wealthy London businessman who was a director of Crystal Palace football club – was tipped to win the post, his supporters claim he lost the vote after refusing to pay bribes during the campaign.
Here are their little bios:
Obama:
Late on a November evening in 1982, Obama [Sr.] was driving home when he rammed his white pickup truck headlong into the high stump of a eucalyptus tree at the side of the road and died instantly. He was forty six.
Obama’s eight children, some of whom had not seen him for years, largely closed the door on the subject of their father. For better or worse, the Old Man was gone.
A quarter-century later another Barack Obama emerged, this one a cerebral U.S. Senator from Chicago who was angling, quixotically it seemed, for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. presidency. As that heavily laden name dominated the headlines and the nightly news, it triggered a flood of complex emotions among some of the elder Obama’s children.
Chiwetel
The actor’s convincing breakthrough performance as a Nigerian doctor/illegal immigrant in the 2002 British drama Dirty Pretty Things can be attributed to the fact that he based it on his own physician father. Unfortunately, his real-life dad died in a tragic car accident that also left the then-11-year-old Ejiofor with a prominent scar on his forehead. Despite this tragedy, Ejiofor pursued his performing dreams and made an auspicious big-screen debut at age 20 in Steven Spielberg’s 1997 slave drama Amistad. The theater-trained actor spent the next few years on the English stage, racking up rave reviews, notably for his Olivier-nominated turn as a schizophrenic in Blue/Orange, which also netted him a Jack Tinker Award for Most Promising Newcomer. Although Dirty Pretty Things established him as a formidable screen presence that led to a slew of work in auteur-helmed films (Spike Lee’s She Hate Me and Inside Man, Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda, John Singleton’s Four Brothers), Ejiofor earned a pair of Golden Globe nominations in 2007 for contrasting roles as Lola, a singing drag queen with a penchant for fancy footwear in the feature Kinky Boots, and in the TV-movie Tsunami: The Aftermath, playing a dad desperately searching for his missing daughter. Heading back to the London stage in 2007, he won the Laurence Olivier award for best actor playing the lead role in Othello. Continuing to excel in a variety of genres, he starred in Roland Emmerich’s 2009 end-of-the world action flick 2012, and played a CIA agent opposite Angelina Jolie in 2010’s spy thriller Salt.
Osi Umunna
The father of a Labour frontbencher who is tipped as a future party leader died in a mysterious car crash that friends fear was a political assassination.
Bennett Umunna, whose son Chuka is Labour’s business spokesman and MP for Streatham, was killed in Nigeria shortly after standing for state governor.
Although Mr Umunna – a wealthy London businessman who was a director of Crystal Palace football club – was tipped to win the post, his supporters claim he lost the vote after refusing to pay bribes during the campaign.
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