Winfrey puts indignation to use bringing ‘Immortal’ to screen
Oprah Winfrey says she lives without feeling rage, which is a nice way to go through your days but potentially limiting when you're playing the pivotal character in a film about an emotionally scarred woman who is all but consumed by it.
Needing to get in touch with some visceral fury, Winfrey reached out to one of the students she calls "my girls" — a young woman from the South African leadership academy she famously endowed — and asked her to recount her experiences with an aunt who had beaten her. Winfrey had been beaten as a child, too, but time and other sources of healing blunted the pain to the point where, as she puts it, there was no "charge" for her left.
"I asked her to tell me the story, because I didn't have enough charge from my own beatings," she explains. "I have to work really, really hard to pull up anger and rage. But hearing someone else talk about their beatings, I could have great empathy, great compassion, great sorrow and sadness."
And an explosive sense of indignation, a summoning she found immensely helpful in conjuring a daughter struggling to come to grips with the fate of her long-dead mother in "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," a movie directed and largely written by George C. Wolfe and based on the best-selling 2010 nonfiction book of that title by Rebecca Skloot. It premieres on HBO on April 22 at 8 p.m.
It's easy to see what the attraction was for the 63-year-old Winfrey, in one of her infrequent acting forays. Her last movie role was in 2014's "Selma," and she appeared in the 2016 drama series "Greenleaf" on her TV network, OWN. Via HBO, she took the project to Wolfe, a theater veteran, after their plans to work on a Broadway show together failed to crystallize. The film, which features Rose Byrne as Skloot and a supporting cast that includes Renée Elise Goldsberry, Reg Cathey, Courtney Vance and Leslie Uggams, tracks a reporter's investigation into the life of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman who died in obscurity in Baltimore in 1951 but who nevertheless became worldrenowned — on a cellular level.
Scientists found that the cells cultured from her tumor samples didn't readily die off, which meant they could reproduce again and again.
As a result, these valuable cell lines, which have come to be known to research labs and biotechnology companies worldwide by Henrietta's abbreviated name, HeLa, have been instrumental in dozens of medical breakthroughs for a number of diseases, including cancer and AIDS, and are still in use to this day.