Camille Winbush
Camille Winbush is an actor, born 1990.
Winbush was working before most people her age had started school. She turns up as Tyeisha Roberts in Dangerous Minds in 1995, the same year as the sitcom Minor Adjustments, and by the late 1990s she was moving between live action and voice booths: Lucy Wilkes in Viper, one of the Ashleys in Recess, additional voices in Disney's Dinosaur, and Pearline in Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.
Then came the run that defined her. As Vanessa Thomkins on The Bernie Mac Show she spent years playing the teenager in a household built around one of the loudest comic performers on television, and her job was to be the still point: the deadpan reaction, the flat teenage stare, the timing that lets someone else have the laugh. Very few child actors can hold a scene by doing less, and that is what she was hired for. Her television work has been credited with three Image Awards and a Young Artist Award.
The transition out of child acting is where most of these careers end, and hers did not. She moved into The Secret Life of the American Teenager as Lauren Treacy, a teen drama that ran for years and asked for a different register altogether, closer to earnest than dry. She appears in the 2012 documentary tribute I Ain't Scared of You, made about the comedian whose show she grew up on.
Movies (5)
TV (7)
Where to start with Camille Winbush
The entry point is The Bernie Mac Show, and the trick is to watch her rather than the star. Bernie Mac plays to the camera and Winbush plays to the room, and the show works because those two speeds keep colliding. It is the best sustained example of a child actor holding her own by refusing to perform harder than the material needs.
Her most interesting film credit is Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, where she is Pearline in a Jarmusch picture that puts a lot of weight on the small, quiet exchanges. Dangerous Minds is where the resume starts, and Recess is the voice work most people her age remember without knowing whose voice it was. Then jump forward to The Secret Life of the American Teenager for the teen-drama years, and finish with I Ain't Scared of You: A Tribute to Bernie Mac if you want the sitcom seen from the outside.