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Sapphire Story: "A Voice for the Voiceless" Crystal Fox
C
rystal Fox is a beautiful Sapphire jewel, a woman of integrity
who makes legendary and trailblazing moves. With her 39
years as a professional actress, dancer, and singer she remains transparent before the world, voicing her truth about her personal career in the entertainment industry. Crystal Fox is best known for her role as Hanna Young on Tyler Perry's "The Haves and the Have Nots" which debuted in 2013 on the Oprah Winfrey Network.
Crystal tells SapphireEmerald that the success of "The Haves and the Have Nots" is rooted in families of different races and classes intermingling in each other’s worlds or as Ms. Fox so eloquently stated, “Its drama, love and pain shared amongst classes. It’s something that rarely has been done on television and it’s drawn in many unexpected fans out of curiosity.” Her character, Hanna Young, “reminds people of an older aunt or grandmother in a way of life that we’ve gotten away from or were raised in. It’s been lost.” But to truly understand Crystal Fox, we have to delve deeper into her past. She explained that while her industry travels are still being navigated, her professional career has spanned almost four decades.
She was born in Tryon, North Carolina and moved on to dancing in Detroit at the young age of eight. It’s been said that the conversations in which we are surrounded by in youth, often influence our way of thinking as adults. Crystal Fox explained in her interview with SapphireEmerald Magazine, she was fortunate to sit at the feet of and come from a family of “debaters, thinkers, talkers and ministers" while growing up. One of those family members was her grandmother, Mary Kate Waymon, a minister until she was 89 years old, and another was her aunt, Nina Simone. The 1960s was a turbulent time and through her music, Nina Simone became a leading voice of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1963, she wrote “Mississippi Goddam” in response to the assassination of Medgar Evers and the Birmingham, Alabama Church bombing that killed four young, innocent, African American girls. Being surrounded by her minister grandmother and her activist aunt played an important role in Crystal's journey into acting. While she soaked in those conversations in Detroit, she essentially was always an activist on the inside, but it eventually would take circumstances to “step up on the outside and do something bigger”.
Photographer: Bobby Quillard
Makeup: Mecca Dickson
Hair: Annagjid " Kee" Taylor
She eventually landed in Atlanta, Georgia where her career began at age 16 in a production of "The Me Nobody Knows". Theatre became her 1st love and Atlanta became her home.
The people who opened up doors for her career were, as she described it, “the theatres who employed me”. It was the theatre that developed her work ethic and nurtured her relationships with people who helped guide her.
Some of her mentors in those early days were people like Barbara Sullivan whose dance company, The Atlanta Dance Theatre, provided training and opportunities to many developing young dancers and artists.
As a choreographer and dancer in Atlanta, notably for the Martin Luther King Junior Tribute, Barbara auditioned Crystal Fox for the opportunity to attend Northside School of Performing Arts where she was accepted and subsequently afforded opportunities to do professional plays outside of school.
Her first play at the renowned Alliance Theatre in Atlanta was "West Side Story" but as a teenager, Crystal
met then actor, now Broadway and TV director, Kenny Leon which led to being cast in a number of roles when Leon became the artistic director of the Alliance.
Later Crystal would star in the Alliance’s 25th Anniversary production of Pearl Cleage's "Blues For An Alabama Sky" where 25 years earlier she had been the understudy for Phylicia Rashad (now friend and mentor) who starred in the premiere production of the show.
Crystal continued to perform in other major Atlanta theaters and regional theatres around the country. Additionally, Carroll O’Conner was “instrumental in how I got into television because he specifically picked me because I was a theatre actress”. He cast her as Sgt. Luann Corbin in "In The Heat of The Night" which ran from 1988-1995 and gave her the opportunity to gain an even greater knowledge of the industry.