Tasha Smith

Tasha Smith is an American actor, director, and producer born February 28, 1971, in Camden, New Jersey. She built a prominent television and film career through sharply drawn supporting characters, especially women whose humor, anger, vulnerability, and determination drive scenes. Smith is perhaps most widely recognized for playing Angela Williams in Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married? (2007) and Why Did I Get Married Too? (2010). In those ensemble comedies, Angela is the outspoken wife of Marcus Williams, played by Michael Jai White, and her volatile marriage is central to the group’s conflicts. Smith reprised Angela on Perry’s television series For Better or Worse, which expanded stories of characters introduced in the films. Her work with Perry also included the Madea film Daddy’s Little Girls (2007), in which she played the children’s mother, and later appearances in the comedy franchise. Smith had an earlier recurring part as Kim in the NBC sitcom Boston Common during the 1996–97 season. She also appeared in the 2004 film The Whole Ten Yards. She reached another large television audience as Carol Hardaway, Cookie Lyon’s troubled older sister on Fox’s Empire. The series cast Taraji P. Henson as Cookie and followed the Lyon family’s music-industry empire; Carol’s appearances brought the Hardaway family’s fraught history into that world. Beyond acting, Smith has established herself as a television director. Her directorial work includes the Lifetime television film When Love Kills: The Falicia Blakely Story (2017), starring Niatia “Lil Mama” Kirkland as Blakely. The drama depicts the real-life case of Blakely, who was convicted of three murders committed in Atlanta as a teenager. Smith has directed episodes of such series as Empire, Black Lightning, P-Valley, Bel-Air, 9-1-1, and BMF. She founded the Tasha Smith Actors Workshop, an acting-training program through which she has taught performers and offered classes and intensives. Smith’s career therefore moves between performing in character-driven popular entertainment and guiding actors and productions behind the camera. In Why Did I Get Married?, eight longtime friends travel to the Colorado mountains for their annual retreat, where revelations test four marriages. Smith’s Angela regularly delivers comic confrontation, but the sequel gives the couple’s problems a darker aftermath when Marcus’s conduct and the group’s tensions escalate. That combination of broad comedy and emotional argument became a defining part of her popular-screen persona. Her later directing assignments demonstrate a transition from actor to episodic storyteller rather than a departure from acting. She continues working in both fields.