‘The Color Purple’: what the main character and Oprah Winfrey, producer of the new film, have in common

In 1985, Oprah Winfrey She was called to play Sofía, a woman who leaves her abusive husband and then goes to prison for refusing to work as a maid. for a white family, a task that is ultimately forced to take on The color purplea film directed by Steven Spielberg and based on the novel by Alice Walker.

So Oprah was a radio and television host without any acting experience, chosen at the insistence of the composer and producer Quincy Jones. When she saw her character again, now played by Danielle Brooks, she cried because she said it had been an emotional trigger for her, “in a good way.”

But perhaps, more than with Sofia, Oprah was able to compare her childhood experiences with those of the abused main character Celie by his father since childhood and had two sons who were taken from him at birth.

Oprah has said that Walker’s novel helped her put into words her own experiences as a teenager She grew up in poverty, was abused and raped, became pregnant at the age of 14 and gave birth to a baby who was born prematurely and died shortly afterwards.. He had no more children.

CV The color purple it was not her idea for the cinema, says Oprah, now almost seventy years old. But lucky for him Steven Spielberg, owner of the rights to the adaptation and director of the first film, accepted the proposal led by the Ghanaian director and visual artist Blitz Bazawule.

Before that, writer-director Scott Sanders brought sisters Celie and Nettie and their friends to Broadway in 2016 to bring them to the stage, with the voices of Jennifer Hudson, Danielle Brooks and Cynthia Erivo in the title role of Celie.

“I couldn’t imagine turning it into a musical,” says the journalist, a figure in her own television program. But Sanders did it and won a Tony Award and a Grammy for it.

Now she is one of the producers of the new film, which will premiere in Ecuador on January 18, with a musical twist and a more cheerful tone despite the strong drama involved.