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Jasmine Guy

Name

Jasmine Guy

Birthplace

Boston, Massachusetts

Birth date

March 10, 1962 (age 50)

Occupation

Actress/Singer/Dancer

Played

Sheila Bennett

Season(s)

1 ▪ 3 ▪ 4

Jasmine Guy is an American actress, singer, and dancer who played Sheila "Grams" Bennett on The Vampire Diaries. She is best known for her starring role as Whitley Gilbert in the television sitcom A Different World and Roxy in Dead Like Me.

BiographyEdit

Jasmine Guy was born to an African American father and a Portuguese American mother on March 10, 1962 in Boston, Massachusetts. Guy was raised in the affluent historic Collier Heights neighborhood of Atlanta, Georgia, where she attended the former Northside Performing Arts High School (which merged with North Fulton High School to form North Atlanta High School). Her mother's name is Jaye Rudolph, and her father, the Reverend William Guy, was pastor of the historic Friendship Baptist Church of Atlanta, which served as an early home to Morehouse College and Spelman College) She later studied dance at Alvin Ailey American Dance Center in New York City in 1981.

During the run of A Different World, she released her self-titled debut album in 1990, which spawned three singles: "Try Me", "Another Like My Lover", and "Just Want to Hold You." The album went on to sell 168,000 copies. In the spring of 2006, Jasmine Guy spoke to the graduating class at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and revealed that she will record a second album. She commented that of all the entertainment industries, the music industry was the worst. She will sell her new album online herself and not through a major label, similar to the marketing strategy used by Prince.

Personal LifeEdit

She married Terrence Duckett in 1998. The couple have one child together, a girl named Imani, born in 1999. On April 8, 2008, people reported that the actress and her husband of nearly 10 years were divorcing due to irreconcilable differences.

Jasmine Guy was also a good friend of slain rapper Tupac Shakur, whom she met through her costar on A Different World, Jada Pinkett Smith. Guy collaborated with Shakur's mother, Afeni, to write a biography of her life as a former Black Panther. The book, "Afeni Shakur: Evolution of a Revolutionary," was published in 2005 by Simon and Schuster and received critical acclaim for its poignancy