Janet Hubert
Janet Hubert is an actor, born 1956.
Janet Hubert trained as a dancer and worked on Broadway before television, which is not the usual route into a Los Angeles sitcom and which shows in the part everyone knows her for. As the original Vivian Banks on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, from the first season in 1990 to the end of the third in 1993, she gave the Banks household its centre of gravity, playing Vivian as the adult least interested in being charmed. The performance drew an NAACP Image Award nomination in 1991.
She left after the third season and the part was recast, and for a long stretch that recasting was the only thing most write-ups had to say about her, which badly undersold a working actor. Through the 1990s and 2000s she took the character parts television offered: Mary Sims on the legal drama Reasonable Doubts, Leora on The Bernie Mac Show, a turn on The Job.
The later run is the more interesting one. Miss May Miller on The Last O.G. and Donna Watkins on Love Life are both written for someone who can be funny and unsentimental in the same breath, which is exactly her setting. Her work as Mignon on the digital series King Ester brought a Daytime Emmy nomination in 2020, and she appeared as herself in the Fresh Prince reunion special that same year.
Movies (2)
TV (8)
Where to start with Janet Hubert
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is the obvious entry and the right one, but watch the first three seasons specifically, because that is her run and the show plays differently with her in it: sharper, less indulgent of its star. Then jump forward. The Last O.G. gives her Miss May Miller and makes the best use anyone has made of her comic timing since; Love Life uses the other half, the warmth she can switch off mid-sentence.
For the film side, The Perfect Find is the easy watch, and My Dad the Bounty Hunter is a reminder that she has a formidable voice and that animation knows it. If you want the archival curiosity, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air Reunion has her back in the room, thirty years on.