Character actress Jenifer Lewis has played the hilarious, take-no-prisoners grandmother Ruby Johnson to great acclaim for 3 1/2 seasons on ABC's hit sitcom "Black-ish."
I'm on the phone with her to discuss her new memoir, "The Mother of Black Hollywood," which gets its name from the myriad roles in which she has played mom - to Angela Bassett (as Tina Turner), Taraji P. Henson, Whitney Houston, Tupac Shakur and several other superstars.
The book's subject matter, however, lies much more with bipolar disorder, with which she was diagnosed in 1990.
Lewis resisted the diagnosis at first and refused to take medication until a self-described nervous breakdown left her convulsing in sobs, a hostage to her untreated neurochemistry. A quarter-century later, she is thriving and happy because, as she says, she "does the work." She takes her medication daily, was in therapy for nearly two decades, and still occasionally checks in for fine-tuning. She routinely hikes, does Pilates, and eats and drinks healthfully. (But she does allow for splurges. One of the book's funnier anecdotes involves eating creme brulee for breakfast on vacation.)
At 61, she is radiant and agile with - as she put it one night while live-tweeting "Black-ish" - "a black belt in high kicks."
Lewis has worked steadily in theater, film and television since earning her first Broadway role in 1979, two weeks after she moved to New York from Kinloch, Missouri, with a brand-new degree in theater arts from Webster University.
She has made educating others about bipolar disorder a huge part of her life's work. Following is a transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity and length.
-The Washington Post
