How Garcelle Beauvais Turned Rejection Into a Thriving Career

But if life really is an audition, as the multi-hyphenate declared in her debut season on the Bravo must-watch, honey, she is getting that part. 

Because days later, “without an appointment or even a head shot in hand,” Beauvais was driving to Fort Lauderdale with a plan to get some face time with Irene Marie, the modeling agency founder she’d learned represented the commercial’s aforementioned star, when “I was completely startled by a hand reaching into my car with a business card,” she recalled in her book. “The voice attached to the hand told me, ‘You should be a model.’ The name on the card: Irene Marie. I later learned she was stopped at the same light in a car behind me, and she saw my face in the side mirror.” 

Within a year, she was on a flight to New York and her future as a Ford model, with all the success (Calvin Klein and Isaac Mizrahi runways giving way to acting gigs in Coming to America and on The Jamie Foxx Show) and rejection that came with it.