Patti Boulaye

Nigerian-born Patti Boulaye has had a unique life: she has lived through one of the great genocides of the 20th century to become a singer, actress, model, activist, and fundraiser -- a career propelled by controversy, determination, faith, and willpower. Patricia Ngozi Ebigwei came into this world on the move, born in 1954 in a taxicab between two villages in the Bendel Igbo region of rural Nigeria. One of eight children, she grew up in the middle of the horrific Biafran civil war, witnessing such horrors as a man running down the street with his head cut off and stepping around fresh bodies as her family walked home from church. Later she credited her mother's steadfast faith through these terrible times as the source of her strength and her musical inspiration, later recalling her mother singing along to her favorite music, Louis Armstrong's "Nobody Knows the Troubles I Seen" and Mahalia Jackson's great gospel prayers. At 16 she left Nigeria and moved to London, where she accidentally stepped into the wrong queue and wound up auditioning for a West End musical instead of going to Madame Tussaud's Wax Palace. She won the audition, and began a career as a stage actress, first in Hair at the Shaftesbury Theatre and then Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Phoenix. Her stunning exotic beauty and powerful singing voice landed her in an all-girl group, the Flirtations; she stayed with them for a year, and recorded several singles, leaving to perform in Jesus Christ Superstar and then the starring role in The Black Mikado. It was around that time that she met and was profoundly inspired by the then 70-year-old English theater actress Evelyn Laye, known to her friends as "Boo"; in direct homage, Patricia Ngozi Ebigwei changed her stage name to Patti Boulaye. No one will really...