HBO’s Black Women Artist Biopics: The Josephine Baker Story and Introducing Dorothy Dandridge

Charlery, Hélène

doi:10.4000/lisa.8993

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…11 Instead of comparing Whitney to the two documentaries about Whitney Houston, the biopic can be compared more productively to other biopics about black female entertainers, such as Lady Sings the Blues, starring Diana Ross as Billie Holiday and Billy Dee Williams as her main love interest Louis McKay, and What's Love Got to Do with It, starring Angela Bassett as Tina Turner and Laurence Fishburne as her domineering and abusive husband Ike. 12 Before focusing on the similarities, however, some significant differences need to be recognized. First, the three films are each separated by two decades, released Sings the Blues and What's Love Got to Do with It are feature films, directed by white men, whereas Whitney is a television movie, directed by a black woman.…”

Section: The Biopic's Gendered Genre Conventionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

What’s Whitney Got to Do with It: Black Female Triumph and Tragedy in the 2015 Lifetime Biopic Whitney

Kooijman

2021

EJLW

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In 2015, the cable television network Lifetime broadcast the biopic Whitney, depicting the troubled life of the late superstar singer Whitney Houston. Whitney is the first film by director Angela Bassett, who, as actress, famously portraited Tina Turner in the biopic What’s Love Got to Do with It (Brian Gibson, 1993). In this article, I will first position Whitney within a larger tradition of the Hollywood biopic by making a comparison to earlier important biopics about black female entertainers, namely Lady Sings the Blues (Sidney J. Furie, 1972), starring Diana Ross as Billie Holiday, and What’s Love Got to Do with It. Second, I will discuss how the narratives of these three biopics tend to reduce their female subjects to victims, emphasizing the tragedy in their personal lives, while assigning much more agency to the male partners of these black female entertainers. Third and finally, I will analyze the final scenes of these three biopics in detail, as each presents a grand finale musical performance that seems to resolve the contradictions of the triumph and tragedy in their subject’s lives, yet in significantly different ways.

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Section: The Biopic's Gendered Genre Conventionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

What’s Whitney Got to Do with It: Black Female Triumph and Tragedy in the 2015 Lifetime Biopic Whitney

Kooijman

2021

EJLW

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

HBO’s Black Women Artist Biopics: The Josephine Baker Story and Introducing Dorothy Dandridge

Cited by 1 publication

References 7 publications

What’s Whitney Got to Do with It: Black Female Triumph and Tragedy in the 2015 Lifetime Biopic Whitney

What’s Whitney Got to Do with It: Black Female Triumph and Tragedy in the 2015 Lifetime Biopic Whitney

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