WHITNEY HOUSTON
A NEW FILM SHOWS THE LATE POP DIVA WHITNEY HOUSTON’S TRAGIC LIFE IN A NEW LIGHT
A powerful new documentary sheds light on the troubled singer’s tragic personal life.
She was only 21 when her self-titled debut album was released on Feb. 14, 1985, and quickly topped the charts, but it wasn’t sudden fame that put Whitney Houston on the path to a difficult life. As the new documentary Whitney reveals, she was molested by cousin Dee Dee Warwick (Dionne’s sister) at a young age and underwent trauma at school as well. “She suffered a lot of racial bullying,” the film’s director, Kevin Macdonald, tells Closer. “She was light-skinned in a dark-skinned neighborhood, and she was always dressed so perfectly by her mother [gospel singer Cissy Houston], so she was beaten up by kids.”
With the cooperation of Whitney’s family, Macdonald set out to capture the singer as she really was. “Not the tabloid monster, not the icon,” he says. “Whitney didn’t really care about money or possessions — she wanted to lead a very simple, sweet life.” Her turbulent marriage to R&B star Bobby Brown, 49, and battle with drug addiction made achieving that goal impossible, especially after their daughter, Bobbi Kristina, was born in 1993. “Whitney struggled with her ability to be a protective mother in a profound way,” the film’s producer Jonathan Chinn tells Closer. “I’m not sure she was quite equipped for it.”
Tragically, Whitney drowned at 48 in 2012, and Bobbi Kristina died in an eerily similar fashion three years later at 22. But the film doesn’t just focus on the sad side of her family’s life. “The biggest surprise is that we get a real, deep understanding of what she was like as an artist,” producer Simon Chinn tells Closer. “We’re telling that story alongside her emotional narrative.” And in the end, making beautiful music may have been Whitney’s greatest love of all.
“I’m a person who wants to live, and I always have been.”
— Whitney