Angela Bassett and Courtney B. Vance have been happily married for 23 years.
According to Angela, the key to their long-lasting union was all about finding the “right” partner.
via People:
The actress appeared on PEOPLE (the TV Show!), ahead of her involvement in this year’s Motion Picture & Television Fund (MPTF) virtual gala, where she talked about what’s kept their romance alive going for over two decades. The couple married in 1997 and welcomed twins — son Slater and daughter Bronwyn — in 2006.
“Staying together so long, whether in the industry or not, I think the important thing is that you gotta marry the right person. Make sure you’re both looking in the same direction, basically,” she says. “You’re not clones of each other, but you have similar or closest similar belief systems and, you know, pleasant personalities. Because we all have strengths, strengths and weaknesses, and we want to support one another. But I think also recognizing that we are each individuals, we have our individual dreams and desires and hopes and ways of, of doing things.”
“Be easy, as easy as you can be on yourself,” she continued. “And some of us that are hard on ourselves, be easy on yourself and be easy with others.”
During her appearance, the 62-year-old actress also spoke about her Black Panther costar Chadwick Boseman and told PEOPLE that the late actor’s “spirit remains with us” almost two months after he died. Boseman died at 43 after a years-long battle with colon cancer.
“[He was] truly, truly one of the most incredible individuals that I have ever had the opportunity to meet and work with,” Bassett said. “He was diligent, professional, kind — he was there.”
Bassett, who played Boseman’s mother Ramonda in the ever-popular Marvel film, added that he had “a ready laugh” and worked “diligently” on his character of T’Challa, who she described as “his ministry.”
“If we could just take a page out of his book, all of us would be even greater,” she added.
Marrying the right person is the whole point — it’s *finding* the right person to marry that seems to be the hard part.
