Troy Beyer
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Troy Beyer | |
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Born | Troy Yvette Beyer November 7, 1964 New York, New York |
Years active | 1984— |
Troy Yvette Beyer (born November 7, 1964) is an American film director, screenwriter and actress.
Born in New York City to an African American Muslim mother and a white Jewish father[1], Beyer began her acting career with a role on the children’s program Sesame Street when she was just four years old. She studied acting and psychobiology at City University of New York's School for the Arts. After landing a bit part in Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club (1984), Beyer moved to Los Angeles, where she became a regular on the ABC primetime soap opera Dynasty in 1986, playing Jacqueline "Jackie" Deveraux, the daughter of Diahann Carroll's character Dominique Deveraux. Beyer went on to earn ShoWest's Newcomer of the Year Award for her leading role in the feature Roof Tops (1989).
Since then, Beyer has acted in features such as Weekend at Bernie's II (1993), Eddie (1996) starring Whoopi Goldberg, Robert Altman’s The Gingerbread Man (1998) starring Kenneth Branagh and Robert Downey Jr., and John Q (2002) starring Denzel Washington.
But it was in 1997 that she put her writing skills to use, making her screenwriting debut with B*A*P*S, starring Halle Berry. Unhappy with how her script had been changed during the course of filming, the following year she decided to direct her next screenplay, Let’s Talk About Sex (1998), also playing a starring role. Beyer made a trailer and took it to the Sundance Film Festival, where she handed it out to film executives. The film was quickly picked up by a prominent distributor. She next wrote and directed Love Don't Cost a Thing (2003) for Warner Brothers, based on the hit 1987 movie Can't Buy Me Love.[1]
Beyer was romantically linked to influential musician Prince in the 1990s and appeared in the video for his song "Sexy MF".
She has two paternal half-brothers Jerry and Ryan Beyer and four maternal half brothers Gregory, Mahmoud, Muhammad, and Jibreel and three maternal half sisters April, Bahiyyah, and Imani.
[edit] References
- ^ Mixed Actors and Actresses Page 2. Mixed Folks. Retrieved on 2006-12-13.