Andra Day taps into legendary jazz singer s trauma in United States vs Billie Holiday
msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Золотий глобус 2021 – всі переможці премії – список
zaxid.net - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from zaxid.net Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The United States vs Billie Holiday review – Andra Day s film all the way Mark Kermode
“It was called ‘the United States of America versus Billie Holiday,’” wrote the jazz legend in her 1956 autobiography, “and that’s just the way it felt.” Holiday’s 1947 conviction, when she was sentenced to a year and a day for possession of narcotics, was just one chapter in a sustained campaign against the singer, whose performances of Abel Meeropol’s anguished, anti-lynching ballad Strange Fruit had become a lightning rod for civil rights awareness and activism.
Holiday’s steadfast refusal to stop singing that song was perhaps the greatest indication of her indomitable spirit, forged in the fires of a tough-as-nails upbringing that saw her survive horrific childhood abuse to become a superstar in an age of often deadly racial and sexual prejudice. Yet in
Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs written by
Johann Hari. You can read the excerpt detailing The Hunting of Billie Holiday on Politico. It was adapted for the screen by Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, so it should come to no surprise that the film has a lot of long, conversational, theatrical scenes.
Besides Day as Holiday, the characters in the film based on real people primarily include the antagonist Henry Anslinger, played by Garrett Hedlund, the United States first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which later became the DEA. In Hari s book, he talks about how Anslinger treated Judy Garland s drug addiction with compassion, calling her “a beautiful, gracious lady,” rather than having her arrested and hounded by cops and federal agents. Holiday was obviously treated much differently.