Behind every breakout story in Hollywood, there is usually a moment, a person, a turning point that set everything in motion long before the cameras started rolling. For Chase Infiniti, that person was not a talent agent or a director or a celebrated mentor in the industry.
She was a woman from Indianapolis who smiled at everyone she met, dressed impeccably even to run errands, devoted more than five decades of her life to her church, and quietly shaped the character of a granddaughter who would one day stand in some of the most celebrated rooms in the world.
Her name was LauWana Payne. She passed away in September 2020 at 91 years old, five years before Chase’s name was known beyond Indianapolis. She never got to see the Golden Globes, the NAACP Image Awards or the cover of Essence magazine.
But she is present in all of them.
Who LauWana Payne Was and Her Place in the Family
LauWana McDamon Payne was 91 years old when she passed away in Indianapolis in September 2020. She was an active member and usher for over 50 years under the leadership of Bishop T. Garrott Benjamin Jr at Second Christian Church, now known as Light of the World Christian Church, one of Indianapolis’s most prominent faith communities.
That is not a small detail. Over 50 years of consistent, dedicated service to a single church is an act of rootedness that speaks to a particular kind of character. It says that LauWana was not someone who dipped in and out of commitments. She showed up. Year after year, decade after decade, she showed up.
Her obituary described her as a beacon of “life coaching” to many, a super mom to her children and to many others. She enjoyed church, reading, watching Jeopardy, travelling, cooking, community service, musicals, plays, and movies. Above all, her family was described as her pride and joy, and she deeply loved her grandchildren.
She is survived by her son, Keith Irvin, his wife, Kimberly, and her grandchildren, Chase Infiniti, Dolcé Imani, Jacob Elijah, Kalani Joy, and Grant Brownell.
Read that list again. Chase Infiniti is the first name among them. And everything Chase has said publicly about her grandmother suggests that LauWana knew, in the way grandmothers sometimes do, exactly what her eldest granddaughter was made of.
The Lessons Chase Has Credited Her Grandmother With Teaching
Chase does not speak about LauWana Payne casually. She speaks about her the way people speak about someone who has permanently changed the way they see things.
In Essence‘s 2026 Black Women in Hollywood feature, Chase fondly recalled her grandmother’s attention to style and presentation, her faith in God, and her deliberate habit of surrounding herself with genuine people. When Chase arrives at the ultimate lesson her grandmother passed on, it is strikingly simple: kindness.
Chase described her grandmother as someone who would smile at everybody and speak to everybody, calling it very midwestern of her. She said she would always watch LauWana with such admiration, wanting to be a ball of light just like her.
In an industry that rewards ambition, strategy, and competitive drive, Chase Infiniti is out here citing kindness as its north star. That is not accidental. That came from someone.
The detail about LauWana’s commitment to presentation, even on a grocery run, is the kind of thing that sounds trivial until you understand what it actually communicates. Showing up fully, even when no one is watching, even when the occasion does not demand it, is a discipline. It is a form of self-respect and respect for the world around you. Chase absorbed that lesson by observation, not by instruction, which is the most durable way to learn anything.
How Paternal Family Values Influenced Chase’s Work Ethic
LauWana’s influence did not exist in isolation. It was part of a larger web of values that ran through the paternal side of Chase’s family, a thread that connects a woman who spent half a century serving her church to a man who built a business from nothing and a daughter who approached Hollywood with the discipline of someone who already understood what real work looked like.
Chase has credited LauWana for teaching invaluable lessons about resilience, kindness, and staying grounded, values she carries directly into her professional life.
Those three things, resilience, kindness, and groundedness, are not traits that Hollywood tends to produce in people. They are traits that have to arrive already formed, before the industry gets its hands on you. Chase came to her career with all three already in place, and the Payne family is where they came from.
Keith Payne, LauWana’s son, built a construction company with his own hands and instilled in his daughter the importance of getting comfortable with rejection. LauWana, Keith’s mother, modelled a life built on consistent service and unconditional warmth toward strangers. The values did not skip a generation. They passed cleanly from grandmother to father to daughter, each person adding their own layer to a foundation that was already solid before Chase ever walked into an audition room.
LauWana also served as a Head Precinct Committee person in Indianapolis, demonstrating that her sense of civic responsibility extended well beyond the walls of her church. She was not simply a warm presence in a pew on Sunday mornings. She was embedded in her community in a way that made her community better. That is the lineage Chase comes from.
The Multigenerational Story Behind the Payne Family’s Creative Streak
One of the most striking things about the Payne family, when you look at it as a whole, is how consistently creativity appears across generations and in different forms.
LauWana’s obituary noted that among her personal interests were musicals, plays, and movies, alongside church, community service, and family. This is the same grandmother who raised Keith Payne, the man who became a jazz drummer before founding a construction company. And Keith and Kim Payne are the parents who spent Chase’s childhood filling their home with music and regularly taking their daughters to live theatre across Indianapolis.
Connect those dots and something remarkable emerges. LauWana loved musicals and plays. Her son played jazz. Her daughter-in-law took her granddaughters to the theatre. Her granddaughter became an actress and a Golden Globe nominee. None of this is a coincidence. It is a creative thread running through a family that has always made space for performance, for storytelling, for the arts, long before anyone in that family had any professional reason to.
The Payne family did not produce an actress because they were chasing fame or opportunity. They produced one because creativity was simply part of how they lived. LauWana going to musicals was not a calculated investment in Chase’s future. It was just who she was. And who she was became part of who her family was, which became part of who Chase is.
What Chase Has Said About Grief and Gratitude in Interviews
LauWana Payne died in September 2020. Chase was 20 years old. She had not yet graduated from Columbia College Chicago. She had not yet had her senior showcase. She had not yet been spotted by a talent manager or signed with an agent. Her grandmother never saw any of it.
Chase has spoken about LauWana with unmistakable emotion at virtually every major press stop during her breakout period, consistently referencing her grandmother regardless of the interview topic.
That consistency is worth noting. Journalists do not always ask about grandmothers. The fact that LauWana comes up again and again across different publications, different formats, and different contexts tells you that Chase is not waiting to be asked. She is finding her way there because she wants to.
In the Essence feature, Chase spoke about missing LauWana very much and thinking about her often, describing the longing for a woman she clearly still measures herself against.
There is a particular grief in achieving something you know a person you loved would have celebrated. Chase is living inside that grief and gratitude simultaneously, walking into rooms that LauWana never got to see, carrying the kindness that LauWana taught her as both tribute and compass. She has not resolved that tension. She has chosen to honour it instead.
How Family Legacy Appears in Her Award Acceptance Speeches
Chase Infiniti is 25 years old and already one of the most frequently nominated actresses of her generation. Her nominations include the Golden Globe, BAFTA, SAG Award, and Critics’ Choice for her performance in One Battle After Another, alongside a BAFTA Breakthrough recognition and an Essence Black Women in Hollywood honour in 2026.
Each of those occasions has been an opportunity to say something in public. And what Chase has chosen to say, repeatedly, is family.
At the Golden Globes, Chase told Extra TV that she had brought her mother to some events and that getting to bring her father had been especially meaningful. Keith, standing beside her on the red carpet, described watching his daughter grow into what she had always aspired to be as nothing short of epic.
She has rotated her family across the award season, bringing her father to some events, her mother to others, and her sister Dolcé to the SAG Awards. The rotation itself says something. She is not selecting a plus-one for optics. She is making sure everyone in her family gets to stand in those rooms, because those rooms belong to all of them.
LauWana is the notable absence in those photographs. She is the family member who cannot be brought to the red carpet or photographed on the steps of the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. And yet she may be the most present of all of them, in the way Chase carries herself, in the discipline of showing up fully, in the refusal to stop smiling at strangers, in the intention to be, as Chase has said more than once, a ball of light.
