Tyra Ferrell

Versatile black player with stage, TV and film experience who appeared on Broadway in "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music" (1981) and gained notice for two quite different but equally impressive performances in 1991: as the attractive, intelligent Bensonhurst woman who dates John Turturro in Spike Lee's "Jungle Fever," and as the harried mother who favors one son (Morris Chestnut) over the other (Ice Cube) in John Singleton's forceful coming-of-age drama, "Boyz N the Hood."