The paths of acting are inscrutable: one day you’re making it big in series like ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ and the next you suddenly realize that it’s simply not a priority in your life anymore. What happened to Karyn Parsons?
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Karyn Parsons was born in 1966, in Los Angeles (California, USA). When she was still in high school, Parsons began her career as an actress and nothing less than on the Broadway stagewhere he would repeat on more than one occasion.
Parsons decided to try his luck on camera and debuted at the age of 21 in the series ‘The Bronx Zoo’. A couple of minor roles would follow in the slasher ‘Bitch Witch’ and in the series ‘Hunter’ and ‘CBS Summer Playhouse’ until she reached the one with which she would give the bell.
‘The prince of Bel Air’ It was a television phenomenon and also the peak of his career. The sitcom starring Will Smith It was on the air between 1990 and 1996, accumulating six seasons and 148 episodes.
In the fiction created by Andy and Susan Borowitz, Parsons played Hilary BanksSmith’s cousin, who started out as a somewhat superficial character but ended up having a notable evolution and earning a place in more than one series-loving heart.
After this series, Parsons I would never find a role that was as iconic as Hilary.: throughout the 90s, he was briefly dropped by a series like ‘Melrose Place’ or ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, and in the odd movie, like ‘Major Payne’ or ‘Mixing Nia’.
He also tried his luck in 1996 with the series ‘Lush Life’, a sitcom created, written, produced and starring herselfbut which was finally canceled after four episodes of the seven that had been shot.
Her last works before leaving her acting career on hiatus were the series ‘The job’ in 2002, the same year that she made her debut as a dubbing actress in the animated series ‘Static Shock’.
After this, Parsons made the decision to get away from the scene. On the one hand, she married filmmaker Alexander Rockwell and gave birth to her first daughter the following year, so she wanted to dedicate herself to being her mother. However, the actress also confessed that the popularity of her character overshadowed the rest of her career and she eventually grew tired of being typecast and that almost all the proposals that came to him later were so similar.
In fact, Parsons He spent 16 years without appearing before the cameras again and only returned exceptionally: for the short film ‘On Monday of Last Week’ (2018), adaptation of a short story from the book ‘Something Around Your Neck’ by the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and starring alongside her children in ‘Sweet Thing’, directed by her husband in 2020.
In recent years, Parsons discovered her passion for writing and has published several children’s bookssuch as ‘Clouds over California’, ‘How High the moon’ or the collection ‘A Sweet Blackberry’, published as part of the initiative of the same name to disseminate stories of different not-so-known black heroes.
Although Parsons does not rule out returning to acting at some point, he currently has other priorities: In his own words: “It wasn’t because I didn’t like it, but because now I have other things to take care of that are most important to me”.
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