Michelle Forbes has spent three decades as the most formidable person in any scene she walks into: Starfleet ensign, battlestar admiral, medical examiner, supernatural menace. Television keeps hiring her for steel and she is good at it. She is better when nobody asks for it.
Fi1m perspective
Michelle Forbes has a voice that arrives before she does, low and a little rough, and a face that profiles have been calling lupine for twenty years. Casting directors hear the voice and reach for a uniform. She has played a Starfleet ensign, an admiral who does not take advice, a chief medical examiner and a supernatural menace in True Blood, and in each of them she is the person the others are afraid of. She does it without ever raising that voice. It is a trade, and she is good at it.
The career has no obvious plan, which she cheerfully admits: "I’ve never had a plan. You look for different actors you want to work with or different subjects you want to explore, or sometimes it’s just a momentary fancy." She began in a dual role on the daytime soap Guiding Light, then became a cult favourite as Ro Laren on Star Trek: The Next Generation (1990–1994). There were films in the early nineties, Kalifornia (1993) and Swimming with Sharks (1994), and then Homicide: Life on the Street (1996–1998) as Julianna Cox, in an ensemble we admired as a whole while wishing the editing would leave the actors alone. After that came the long run of recurring parts that most viewers know her from: 24, Admiral Helena Cain in Battlestar Galactica (2005), Maryann Forrester in True Blood (2008), Mitch Larsen in The Killing (2011–2012), and later Berlin Station, Treadstone and a return to Ro Laren in Star Trek: Picard.
The pattern is plain and so is the complaint about it. She is cast for intensity, in crime or in genre, and one profile has suggested her looks keep her out of ordinary parts. The best of the television work is the exception that proves it: Mitch Larsen in The Killing is a grieving mother, not an authority, and critics who had filed Forbes under steel found something else there. The steel was never the whole of it. It was simply what people kept asking for.
Columbus (2017) asked for something else. Kogonada gives her three or four scenes as Maria, Casey’s mother, in a film about two stalled people and a great many modernist buildings, and she makes each one count. We went for the architecture and found ourselves waiting for her to come back, because she plays an unremarkable woman in Indiana with the same concentration she brings to a warship, and without a trace of the commanding officer. It is a small part and it is the one we would show someone who thinks they know what she does.
Somebody will go on hearing that voice and reaching for the uniform. Columbus is what happens when one of them forgets to.
Biography
Michelle Forbes is an American actress. Born Michelle Renee Forbes Guajardo on 8 January 1965 in Austin, Texas, she trained at the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston and began her professional career in her teens after signing with the William Morris Agency.
She first received attention for a dual role in the daytime soap opera Guiding Light, earning a Daytime Emmy Award nomination. Forbes is known for recurring and regular roles on television including Ensign Ro Laren in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994), Julianna Cox in Homicide: Life on the Street (1996–1998), Admiral Helena Cain in Battlestar Galactica (2005–2006), and Maryann Forrester in True Blood (2009–2010). She has also appeared in 24, Prison Break, The Killing and the film Columbus (2017).
Forbes won a Saturn Award and has received Primetime Emmy Award and other nominations.
