THE UNITED STATES VS. BILLIE HOLIDAY
The FBI target the jazz legend…
DIRECTOR Lee Daniels STARRING Andra Day, Trevante Rhodes, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Garrett Hedlund, Evan Ross, Tyler James Williams, Natasha Lyonne
When Lee Daniels was 15, Diana Ross was a force in his life and he was a big fan of Sidney J. Furie’s 1972 biographical-drama Lady Sings The Blues, in which Ross portrays the great singer. It wasn’t until Daniels was 40, though, that he got into Holiday’s music and “understood her pain”.
Now 61, Daniels has chosen Holiday as the subject for his first feature since The Butler in 2013. Based on a script by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter Suzan Lori-Parks, The United States Vs. Billie Holiday covers the last 15 years of the singer’s troubled life, and her harassment by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.
“I was blown away by her story, which was really a story of the government coming after Billie,” says Daniels. “They didn’t want her singing ‘Strange Fruit’, which is about the lynching of African-Americans. They knew she was addicted to drugs, and they kept planting drugs on her when she was trying to stop.
And she just continued to sing the song. To me, she was a Civil Rights Leader, and I don’t think she gets the credit for that. This film explains how ‘Strange Fruit’ really kicked off the Civil Rights Movement.”
Trevante Rhodes (Moonlight, Bird Box) plays Jimmy Fletcher, one of the first Black FBI agents, hired to infiltrate Harlem. Fletcher was charged with bringing down Holiday and entered into a tumultuous affair with her. As for Holiday, her huge shoes are filled by the singer Andra Day. “I really didn’t care whether they were an unknown or a star, I was just looking for someone to inhabit Billie’s spirit,” says Daniels. “Andra brought the soul of Billie. She hadn’t acted before, but there was a rawness and a vulnerability. She was pretty breathtaking in the auditioning process.”
With filming beginning in October 2019, Daniels had no idea just how relevant his film would become by time of release. “I didn’t know that we’d be in the middle of this civil war in the United States,” he says. “Half of this country feels, to me, as if they’re racist.” ETA I 12 MARCH 2021