Madge Sinclair

Madge Sinclair was a Jamaican actress who moved to New York from Kingston, Jamaica, where she was born, after working as a teacher. She began on stage with Joseph Papp's Public Theatre and in 1971 played Clytemnestra in The Wedding of Iphigenia. Her film debut came in Conrack (1974), and she earned an NAACP Image Award nomination for it. She gained wider notice as Bell Reynolds in the 1977 miniseries Roots, which brought her first Emmy nomination, and later appeared in Convoy (1978) and Cornbread, Earl and Me. On television she spent the 1980s as nurse Ernestine Shoop in Trapper John, M.D., earning three Emmy nominations. In 1988 she played Queen Aoleon in Coming to America, and in 1994 she voiced Sarabi in The Lion King, her final film. She won an Emmy in 1991 for Gabriel's Fire.