here's an elephant in the room. There's always one in the room with Marianne Jean-Baptiste. That same old elephant; where have you been all these years? Actually, the answer is simple. The actress, Oscar-nominated for her quietly heart-breaking Hortense in Mike Leigh's Secrets & Lies, has been living in Los Angeles, working away (notably as an FBI agent in the long-running television series Without a Trace, and bit parts in movies), bringing up her family, living the good life. It's the question that is more delicate - why did she leave in the first place?

(...) The thing is, she says, she doesn't want to be portrayed as a victim because she isn't one. "It's not this sob story. I had a choice. I could have stayed and fought it out, but I thought you know what, this is madness, it's like fishing in a river and seeing people grabbing fishes upstream and you're still down there going, `This is where I need to be, this is my spot.' You fucking walk up stream and you catch your fish. I'm a member of the African diaspora, my parents left the Caribbean and came to London for a better life. We moved. And you print that, with the expletives."

Caribbean British Oscar-nominated Cannes winner left Britain for LA. Interesting interview.