La Belle Beauvais

SCREEN SIREN GARCELLE BEAUVAIS-NILON'S SHIP COMES IN

Before she was turning heads on television as a sharp-tongued desk clerk and a strong-willed assistant DA, Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon was just another stunning model strug­gling to prove she could be more than a pretty face. She wanted to act. One day she got word that Aaron Spelling, the executive producer of Charlie's Angels and Beverly Hills 90210, was casting a new prime-time soap opera about the inner workings of the fashion industry. She would be perfect, she figured. There was only one prob­lem: "My agents said, They're not going to cast any black models,'" Garcelle recalls. "And I thought, You've got to be kidding me."

Garcelle showed up the next morning at Spelling's offices in Los Angeles with a letter addressed directly to the legendary producer. He must have been impressed. Within days she was cast in her first starring role, in a series called Models, Inc. The show didn't last long, but Garcelle did.

As she tells the story now, years later, Garcelle smiles between sips of cranberry juice. We're in a private corner of the bar at the W New York-Times Square hotel. She's dressed plainly in blue jeans and a gray tank top, but still, security spotted her the moment her leg swung out of the taxi, a fact that accounts for our private booth,

secluded even from the hotel's swanky clientele. She says she is not the person people think she is. The woman we've come to know and love as Francesca "Fancy" Monroe, Jamie Foxx's sultry roman­tic foil on The Jamie Foxx Show, and as the uncompromising assis­tant district attorney Valerie Hey-wood on MYPD Blue doesn't regard herself as the sort of person who kicks down doors to get what she wants. "I hate confrontation, and I cry at the drop of a hat," she says with a self-deprecating laugh. "It's bizarre. The roles I get as an actor are tough, and I've had to learn to play that, because it wasn't in me."

Not tough? We're not buying it. Garcelle has faced obstacles at every turn. She was only seven years old when her family emi­grated from Haiti, where she was born in the town of Saint-Marc and raised in the capital, Port-au-Prince. She ended up in the chillier climes of Peabody, Massachusetts. She learned to speak English by watch­ing Sesame Street. Her classmates had never seen anyone who looked like her before. "I remem­ber kids coming up and touching my skin because I was the only black kid in school," she says. "That was kind of daunting."

When she was 16, Garcelle and family moved again, this time to sunny Miami, where a scout promptly discovered her. She was

recruited by Ford Models, through which she gained entree into one of the most glamorous and competitive industries in glamorous, competitive New York. Gar-celle didn't get steady work right away, but she had a plan B: She got a fake ID (she was only 17). donned a pair of rabbit ears and a powder-puff tail and landed a job as a waitress at New York's Playboy Club (this was the mid-1980s). "I was Bunny Garcelle." she confesses. "I still have my ID card."

Soon she was booking print cam­paigns, strutting on runways and par­laying her modeling into acting jobs. John Landis saw her potential and gave her a small part in Coming to America (watch for Garcelle as a flower girl toss­ing rose petals at Eddie Murphy's feet). Michael Mann cast her in the video for Peter Wolf's "I Need You Tonight" and episodes of Miami Vice. She guest-starred on sitcoms from The Cosby Show to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

As Garcelle climbed her way up the Hollywood ladder, she found herself struggling with the limited opportunities the entertainment industry offered black actors. She explains, "They usually say, 'We're going in another direction.' It could mean anything—it could be because of color, or it could be because they want Halle Berry or Gwyneth Paltrow. So you never really know." When Garcelle was presented with roles written specifically for people of color, she discovered there were other biases to overcome. "They'd say. 'Oh. she's not street enough: she's not black enough,'" she says. "I didn't want to play the ghetto girl. We have so many stereotypes already that I didn't want to contribute to them."

Garcelle earned her breakout role on The Jamie Foxx Show in 1996. For five seasons she starred opposite the future Oscar winner, who she says has "the most energy of anyone I've ever met. Jamie would fly out on a Thurs­day after rehearsal, do stand-up all across the country, party—and when I say party. I mean party—and show up on Monday with the craziest stories you've ever heard. You're like. 'How do you do all that in one weekend? And who are these girls?'"

(text concluded on page 134)

Don't mess with the man, particularly when she's beautiful. Garcelle played the gritty but gorgeous assistant DA Valerie Heywood on NYPD Blue (left, solo and with cast). She also appeared in the ABC series Eyes (center, with co-star Timothy Daly) and starred opposite Chris Rock (right) on the big screen in Bad Company. Check out his face; he knew she was stealing the show.

GARCELLE

(continued from page 106)

Garcelle passed on the Jamie Foxx Show role at first. Who knew that this stand-up comedian named Jamie would become the phenom we know today? Even when she signed on, she wasn't expecting the ride to last long. "We thought if we did 13 episodes, we'd be lucky," Garcelle says, laughing. "We ended up doing 100 episodes." Though their TV characters became romantically entwined, Garcelle says a real-life relationship between her and Foxx would never have worked. "We were both single at the time, and there was a lot of chemistry," she says, "but we were great about not crossing the line. When I got engaged three weeks after the show ended, he was like, 'What, you couldn't wait?'Jamie, I know your lifestyle—not for me."

Right before taking the plunge with Mike Nilon, a talent agent at CAA, Gar­celle joined the cast of NYPD Blue, the long-running crime drama that some­times called for her to appear without her legal briefs. As brave as she'd been with her career choices, Garcelle says the show's occasional nude scenes were frightening. "You're in a room with 10 people you don't know and the actor you're working with, and even though you have pasties on, they don't really hide anything," she says. "Even if he's the nicest guy, it's still awkward."

Her ri.AYBOY photo shoot, however, was a different story. "Of course I was nervous about doing it," says Garcelle, "but the crew was great. They made me feel so comfortable. By the second day, my stylist was like, 'Do you want your robe?' And I had to think about it, like, Oh yeah, right."

Fans can next see Garcelle in the Lindsay Lohan thriller / Know Who Killed Me, which hits theaters July 27. Show business, Garcelle says, "is like a love-hate relationship. The process is tough, but when you're working you're madly in love. I've proven to myself that 1 can keep working. 1 think I've come a long way."

To her list of accomplishments Garcelle can now add that she's one of a growing number of women of color who have graced playboy's cover, a roster that includes Naomi Camp­bell, Traci Bingham, Robin Givens and Darine Stern, whose iconic Octo­ber 1971 appearance was named one of the magazine industry's top 40 covers of the past 40 years, in 2005. "When I tell people I'm on the cover, they do a double take," Garcelle says, laughing. "It's such a big deal. And I say, 'Document it now so I can show my grandchildren — with tape over certain parts.'"

re of Garcelle at cyber.playboy.com.