◆ Stars Fantasia Barrino, Danielle Brooks and Taraji Henson tell Jessica Rawnsley about the power of films to heal and how they all wept when watching the new version of The Color Purple

Ithink it p **** s off God if you walk by the colour purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back. I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask.” So ponders Celie as she wanders the verdant, blushing meadows near her home in Georgia. The snippet from Alice Walker’s 1982 novel, The Color Purple, tugs at the core of her heroine. An unerring grace in the face of misery and devastation, a soft wisdom, the ability to turn from pain and see the beauty of the world.

More than four decades later, Walker’s Pulitzer-winning story continues to resonate and reverberate. Its latest incarnation is a musical adaptation of the same name, featuring brutal scenes of abuse and abject loneliness laced with bursts of colour, joy and jubilant song.

Celie is a poor African-american girl living in rural Georgia in the 1900s. Her life is blighted by abuse, rape, racism, inequality and poverty. We meet Celie as a young girl – breakout star Phylicia Pearl Mpasi – heavily pregnant for the second time by her monstrous father, her saving grace her sister Nettie, played by The Little Mermaid’s Halle Bailey.

A fiery, roiling indictment of black women’s treatment, the story charts Celie’s harrowing life, married off to an abusive, hateful husband, Mister, ripped apart from her sister, and subject to long decades of oppression and isolation.

“I think people are still going through the same stuff today,” says American Idol’s Fantasia Barrino, who plays the adult Celie, on the story’s enduring power. “It may look different, have a new swag, but we still want the same stuff.”

Populating The Color Purple, and providing relief and inspiration to Celie, are strong, strident women. There’s Sofia, a fiercely independent, outspoken woman, who knows her own worth. There’s Shug Avery, a sassy and sensual jazz and blues singer, and Mister’s long-time mistress. Celie is shown as a survivor who finds strength and solidarity in her relationships with other women.

“It’s rare that you get movies like this, that really bless you and heal you and your family,” says Orange Is The New Black’s Danielle Brooks, recently Oscar-nominated for her portrayal of Sofia. “The visibility, on so many levels, means that what we do can truly change people’s lives. There’s power in it.”

“For me, what stood out was the joy,” says Empire’s Taraji P Henson, who plays Shug Avery. “There was a lot of trauma

and a lot of things that were hard to watch, but in the end, these characters kept choosing joy over and over again, no matter what. And that’s right. That’s a birthright you have. No-one can take that from you. It’s like your dreams. Celie’s imagination – no-one could take that from her. That’s what kept her alive.”

A romantic, gentle love blossoms between Shug and Celie as they show each other an affection and reverence never given to them by men.

“Shug was the change shifter,” continues Henson, 53. “She came and changed and lifted everyone up. Finding unconditional love from an unlikely place, who knew, right? That this woman – all these men she’s been dating – never showed her this kind of love.

“It’s great to see us explore that. Because you know, back then (in the previous adaptations), we weren’t so open. Now, we can open up that book, that beautiful poetry that Alice Walker left us. We can show you a little more within those pages.”

This version was written by Marcus Gardley and directed by Blitz Bazawule, who co-directed Beyonce’s film, Black Is King. The novel was first adapted for the screen in 1985 by Steven Spielberg, starring Whoopi Goldberg as Celie and Oprah Winfrey as Sofia. 2005 saw a Broadway musical adaptation produced by Scott Sanders, Quincy Jones and Oprah Winfrey, and which inspired the film.

The latest rendition unites a string of previous creators, including Spielberg, Jones, Sanders, and Winfrey. Fusing gospel, blues and jazz, it incorporates

Danielle Brooks as Sophia and Fantasia Barrino as Celie, main; Colman Domingo as Mister, above; Phylicia Pearl Mpasi as young Celie and Halle Bailey as Nettie, below songs from the Broadway show while introducing new numbers.

The star-studded cast also includes Rustin’s Colman Domingo as Mister; Blackkklansman’s Corey Hawkins as Mister’s son, Harper; Black-ish’s Deon Cole as Celie’s father, Alfonso; and Whoopi Goldberg, who appears briefly as a midwife.

It is Barrino’s debut film, the 39-yearold best known as a potent singer who rose to prominence winning American Idol as a teenage single mother in 2004.

“I kind of relate it to music,” she says of film-making, in her soft, sonorous cadence. Turning to Brooks, she continues: “We sing the song, you act the song. It’s all in the melodies. It’s all music. It’s all melody.”

“It’s all a dance,” puts in Brooks, 34. Filming was a profound, beautiful, yet difficult experience for the women. “There’s a lot of tough subject matter that we had to deal with,” explains Henson, “and it opened up a lot of old wounds for a lot of us, for sure.”

Watching it for the first time once it was finished, they sat together and wept. “We all wept,” Henson says. “It was me, Fantasia, Danielle, and we were just sobbing. It was quite an experience. And I’ve only seen it once. I can’t wait to see it again.

“Bring tissues, bring a box of Kleenex, you’re going to need it,” she continues. “But you will also find joy. You’re going to laugh, you’re going to sing. You might get up and dance. And you will definitely cry.”