Thandie gets a grip on Oscar

by BAZ BAMIGBOYE, Daily Mail

Last updated at 10:38 10 March 2006


Thandie Newton was the one face missing on Oscar night when Crash zoomed in to win the best picture award.

The actress, who won a Bafta award for her performance in Crash, stayed home in London with daughter Ripley, who had chicken-pox.

However, the London-born star was determined to claim a little bit of Academy Award glory for Britain.

"There are around 79 of us in the cast," Thandie joked when we talked yesterday. 'So I'm claiming a seventy-ninth part of the Oscar for my country."

Though Crash does, indeed, have a large ensemble cast - including Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle and Terrence Howard - Thandie's role as

a woman caught up in a bitter post 9/11 struggle of ethnic identity in Los Angeles has a lot of screen time.

"It was a proud moment for me as a British girl to win the Bafta and then for the film to win the best picture Oscar," Thandie told me.

Audiences have been connecting to the film, which (along with Oscar-winning Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit) is top of Virgin Megastore's DVD chart.

Thandie leaves for LA in a couple of weeks for what she calls 'a bit of a giggle' with Eddie Murphy in his new film, Norbit, a comedy with a

complicated edge to it about two friends in an orphanage and how they meet up and fall in love 20 years later.

"I'm the straight man in the film," said Thandie.

Murphy plays multiple parts, including his own ghastly wife, Raspusha.

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