>Forest Whitaker
Man in Emotion
With Waiting to Exhale and now Hope Floats, actor-turned-director Forest Whitaker has made two movies featuring more broken relationships than a Bruce Willis film has broken glass. "I wasn't thinking I'm going to do a woman's movie," insists Whitaker, 36, about Hope Floats, in which Sandra Bullock plays a woman who leaves her philandering husband and returns to her hometown; there she encounters a childhood pal (Harry Connick Jr.). The film, Whitaker says, is "about knowing that, no matter what happens, you can still go forward."
Whitaker's career is moving forward too, from acting jobs in Good Morning, Vietnam and The Crying Game to his current directing. "It's a natural progression of me trying to express myself," says Whitaker, who is raising a 19-month-old daughter, Sonnet Noel, with his wife, model Keisha Nash (each parent also has a child from a previous relationship). Expression is taking him in several directions: He's developing three different TV projects and, having sung opera at USC, says he'd love to do a musical. "Wherever storytelling takes me," he says, "I'll go there."
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