Learn more about Angela Bassett’s twins, Bronwyn and Slater, who she had via surrogate with her husband, Courtney B. Vance.
Few actresses have had as prolific a career as Angela Bassett, 63, has had. She’s captivated audience for decades from her performances in biopics like What’s Love Got To Do, where she played Tina Turner, to playing comic book characters, like in Black Panther. Throughout much of her lengthy career, she’s been married to stage actor Courtney B. Vance. In January 2006, the couple had twins Slater and Bronwyn via a surrogate.
Many of the actress’s biggest onscreen roles have shown off some of her motherly instincts (such as playing rapper Notorious B.I.G.’s mom Violetta Wallace in Notorious), and the actress has been open about the values she tries to instill in her 15-year-old twins. Angela is clearly a doting mother, and has raved about her children. “It is a joy seeing them growing so beautifully, you know, so bright, so smart, so compassionately, and you just want them to be aware, you know?” she told Closer Weekly in 2019.
Angela has spoken about what a great relationship she has with her kids. She also said that she sends her kids to public school in a 2019 interview with Jimmy Kimmel. “They are in public school. I went to public school, turned out okay by me,” she said at the time. Learn more about Angela’s twins here!
Bronwyn Vance
Angela seems like she’s very close with her daughter. The actress shared an adorable mother-daughter photo of the pair in January 2020. Angela rocked a maroon tracksuit with orange trim, while her little girl wore turquoise leggings and a white sweater. “On a stretch of unspoiled California coastline with my beautiful daughter,” she wrote in the caption.
Besides the sweet hiking photo, Angela has spoken about how Bronwyn, and how her daughter takes after her in a 2019 interview with Vulture. “My daughter, from the time she was a little one, was always sort of looking to me for the example of what to do and how to be,” she said. “If I told her brother something like, ‘Slater, put that down. Slater, don’t stand on that. Slater —’ she would be my little copy. If he would do something, she would say, ‘Slater, put that down! Slater don’t stand on that!’ She was my little copycat.”
Slater
Angela has been open about the fact that both of her kids are very musically inclined, and her son, Slater, has shown aspirations of being a musician. In May 2019, she posted a photo on Instagram of her son with the rapper Logic and said that the Bobby Tarantino artist influenced him to want to rap about “Peace, love and positivity.” She also explained how Logic was her “son’s favorite performer” during a 2019 appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! “He says he’s the best rapper living or dead,” she said. “Strong opinions.”
It sounds like both of her kids are very musically inclined. She spoke about how much her kids loved her in the jazz-inspired Disney-Pixar movie Soul on the red carpet for the 2021 Golden Globes, according to People. “They loved it. They both play the piano and rap and play guitar, so they have a little musical interest that I drill into them, that I insist upon,” she said. “They got a lot of the themes, a lot of the ideas from it and really appreciated it.”