L. Scott Caldwell

L. Scott Caldwell, born Laverne Scott in 1950 in Chicago, Illinois, is an American actress whose Broadway career spanned from 1980 to 1997. She is recognized for her Tony Award-winning performance in Joe Turner's Come and Gone and for her television roles as Deputy U.S. Marshal Erin Poole in The Fugitive (1993) and Rose in the series Lost.

Caldwell grew up in the Woodlawn neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, the middle child of working-class parents. She attended Hyde Park High School, where she joined the drama club, and it was during this period that a class trip to see A Day of Absence, featuring Douglas Turner Ward, co-founder of The Negro Ensemble Company, gave her her first exposure to professional Black actors on stage. After graduating in 1967, she enrolled at Northwestern University but left after one year to work full-time as an operator at Illinois Bell. She later transferred her credits to Loyola University-Chicago, where she earned a bachelor's degree in Theater Arts and Communications.

Before pursuing acting professionally, Caldwell taught at the Chicago High School of the Performing Arts and spent a year with the Chicago Council on Fine Arts as an artist-in-residence. She performed in local theatrical productions at the Body Politic, Court Theater, and Eleventh Street Theater. In 1978, she traveled to New York to audition for Uta Hagen's HB Studio. While waiting to audition, she saw an advertisement for The Negro Ensemble Company and, after completing her audition at Hagen's school, went directly to the NEC. Initially turned away by the interviewer, she insisted on meeting with Ward and used the same three pieces from her Hagen audition. She was accepted by both institutions.

During her first season at the NEC, Caldwell appeared in several productions. One of them, Home by Samm Art Williams, transferred to Broadway's Cort Theatre in 1980, marking her Broadway debut. She played Pattie Mae Wells and Woman One in the critically acclaimed production. In December 1984, while working in A Play of Giants, she was struck by a car on Columbus Avenue in New York while hailing a cab, sustaining a severe back injury that kept her from working for nearly two years.

Her first audition following her recovery was for August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone. Her portrayal of Bertha Holly in the 1987–1988 production earned her the 1988 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play. Caldwell also appeared on Broadway in A Month of Sundays in 1987, in which she served as understudy for the role of Mrs. Baker. She returned to Broadway in 1997 as Clemma Diggins in Neil Simon's Proposals. Following the close of that production, she performed the role of Leah in New York City Center's Encores! concert production of St. Louis Woman.

After winning the Tony Award, Caldwell relocated to southern California to pursue work in television and film, while continuing to work in theater across the United States, Canada, and South Africa. In 2006, she made her Goodman Theatre debut in Regina Taylor's The Dreams of Sarah Breedlove, playing the title role of Sarah Breedlove and Madam C.J. Walker, a performance that earned her a BTAA Award for Best Leading Actress in a Play. In 2007, she participated in tributes to August Wilson at Goodman Theatre and at St. Louis Black Repertory Company. In 2011, she played Lena Younger in the Ebony Repertory Theatre production of A Raisin in the Sun, directed by Phylicia Rashad. That performance earned her the 2011 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Lead Performance and Ensemble Performance, and she and the cast received a nomination for the LA Stage Alliance Ovation Award.

Caldwell completed her late husband Dasal Banks's final film, My Brothers and Me, a documentary created to raise awareness about prostate cancer among Black men, and she is credited as its director. She also directed a 2010 staged reading of Standing On My Sisters' Shoulders for the Los Angeles chapter of Actors' Equity Association. In 2016, she appeared in the PBS Civil War drama series Mercy Street.

An active member of Unite For Strength, the Screen Actors Guild coalition in favor of merging with AFTRA, Caldwell won a seat as an alternate on the SAG national board of directors and the Hollywood division board of directors in September 2008. She was elected to a second one-year term in September 2009 and to a one-year term on the national board in September 2010, serving as national chair of the Women's Committee. In 2011, she won a three-year term on both the national and Hollywood boards, serving as national chair of the Women's and Healthcare Safetynet committees. She has also participated in panels and lectures on African American actors, including the NAACP Theatre Awards Festival Actors on Acting panel in June 2008 and a panel on African American images in Hollywood in June 2009.