Tina Andrews

Tina Andrews is an American actress, screenwriter, television producer, playwright, and author born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, one of two children of Eloyce and George Andrews. She attended Harlan Community Academy High School, where she was involved in Modern Dance, Drama Club, and Student Council, graduating in 1969. Andrews subsequently enrolled at New York University, where she majored in Drama.

Andrews began her professional performance career on Broadway in 1971, appearing in Hello, Dolly! Her stage work preceded a sustained career in television and film. On the daytime drama Days of Our Lives, she originated the role of Valerie Grant, a character she portrayed from 1975 to 1977 whose storyline was part of the first interracial romance depicted on daytime television. Andrews went on to play Angie Wheeler in The Sanford Arms and appeared in the landmark 1977 miniseries Roots as Aurelia, the girlfriend of Kunta Kinte. That role brought her into a professional partnership with Roots author Alex Haley, who later engaged her to work on the miniseries Alex Haley's Great Men of African Descent. Additional television credits include the role of Valerie on Falcon Crest in 1983, the television movie Born Innocent, and guest appearances on The Odd Couple, Love Story, Sanford and Son, Good Times, and The Brady Bunch. Her film work includes Conrack and Carny.

Andrews developed a parallel career as a writer, with a particular focus on underrepresented historical narratives. Her play The Mistress of Monticello, which examined the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, was produced in Chicago in 1985. Approximately a decade later, producer Craig Anderson began collaborating with Andrews to adapt the material for television. Anderson had optioned the rights to historian Fawn McKay Brodie's 1974 biography of Jefferson, which had examined the long-rumored liaison between Jefferson and Hemings. During the sixteen years Andrews worked on the project, a 1998 DNA study confirmed a match between the male-line descendants of Hemings and Jefferson, prompting prominent Jefferson historian Joseph Ellis to publicly conclude that Jefferson had a sustained relationship with Hemings and fathered all of her children. The resulting CBS miniseries, Sally Hemings: An American Scandal, aired in 2000, directed by Charles Haid and starring Carmen Ejogo as Hemings and Sam Neill as Jefferson. It marked the first time the Jefferson-Hemings relationship had been explored on American television. Andrews also wrote the CBS miniseries Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis and the screenplay for the 1998 film Why Do Fools Fall in Love.

Andrews has received significant recognition for her writing. In 2001, she became the first African American to win the Writers Guild of America Award for Original Long Form, earning the honor for her Sally Hemings script; she shared the award that year with Phil Alden Robinson and Stanley Weiser, who won for the film Freedom Song. Also in 2001, Andrews received the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding TV Movie, Miniseries or Special. In 1999, she had received a nomination at the Acapulco Black Film Festival for Best Screenplay for Why Do Fools Fall in Love. Following the miniseries, Andrews published the nonfiction book Sally Hemings: An American Scandal: The Struggle to Tell the Controversial Truth in 2001 through Malibu Press, recounting her sixteen-year effort to bring the story to a wider audience. In 2002, that book earned her both the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Achievement in Literary Nonfiction and the Literary Award of Excellence from the Memphis Black Writers Conference. In 2003, Andrews received the MIB/Prism Filmmaker Image Award and a proclamation from the New York City Council.

Andrews has continued to write across multiple forms. She contributed an essay to the 2002 anthology The First Time I Got Paid for It: Writers Tales from the Hollywood Trenches. Her novel The Hollywood Dolls was published by Malibu Press in 2009. Additional books include Awop Bop Aloo Mop: Little Richard, A Life of Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll and Religion and the historical novel Princess Sarah: Queen Victoria's African Goddaughter, both from Malibu Press. Her historical novel Charlotte Sophia: Myth, Madness, and the Moor, published in 2010 and reissued in paperback in 2013, examines the life of Charlotte of Mecklenburg, wife of King George III, exploring the theory that the queen had a Black ancestor in the thirteenth century. Andrews adapted that novel as the play Buckingham, which premiered at the Southampton Cultural Center in May 2013. An updated edition of the book, retitled Queen Charlotte Sophia: A Royal Affair, was acquired by Jacaranda Books for publication in 2023. The play The Mistress of Monticello received staged readings at the Southampton Cultural Center in February 2013. In 2019, Andrews joined other WGA members in terminating their agents' representation as part of the guild's dispute with the Association of Talent Agents over the practice of packaging.