![]() “Rebecca had many recordings of Deborah,” says Oprah, “and in one of them, she actually says she wants me to play her. I wanted to bring this story to light so people could know who she was.” Initially, being in front of the camera wasn’t part of her vision, Oprah says, but one of Skloot’s taped conversations with Deborah, who died mere months before the book release, compelled her to take the leap of faith. “In all my experiences of community and media work there, I never once heard Henrietta’s name. “I lived in Baltimore for eight years,” Oprah says. ![]() Henrietta Lacks also resonated for more personal reasons. “There’s even a line where one of the aunts goes, ‘We don’t speak of the dead.’ So for me, it’s a story about a daughter’s search for her mother-and through that search, she develops her own identity.” “Nobody talked about Henrietta after she was gone,” Oprah says. As ferociously driven as Skloot (played by Rose Byrne), Deborah wanted to unearth every detail about her mom, who died when Deborah wasn’t yet 2 years old. Skloot spent 11 years researching and writing the book, which makes its screen debut on April 22 in an HBO film featuring Oprah as Lacks’s devoted daughter Deborah. Published in 2010, science writer Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks not only pieces together Lacks’s life and legacy, but also depicts the confusion and betrayal her children experienced when they learned, in 1973, after decades spent out of the loop, that a part of their mother lived on. ![]() “I couldn’t get Deborah’s voice, which was very high- pitched,” says Oprah, “so I worked on picking up her cadence and rhythms.” Deborah and her brother Zakariyya Rahman first see their mom’s cells through a microscope in 2001. ![]() HeLa cervical cells stained with blue dye. Lacks died eight months after her first treatment, never knowing that her cells would change the course of medical history.Ĭlockwise from left: Oprah as Deborah in front of a projection of Henrietta’s cells at Johns Hopkins. But no one had asked Lacks, or her family, for permission to remove the sample. To their amazement, the uncommonly resilient cells, which they labeled HeLa, kept reproducing. When Lacks, a young black mother of five living in Baltimore, went to the Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951 to be treated for cervical cancer, doctors removed slices of tissue from her cervix. For decades, researchers tried and failed to find a solution-until a miracle occurred. They had a name for their dream: an immortal cell line, a forever-multiplying supply that would let them experiment with new vaccines and drug therapies they’d never be allowed to test on people. There was a time when scientists could only dream of growing human cells outside the body. She had the door slammed in her face many times.” Oprah between scenes with director of photography Sofian El Fani ( left), executive producer Lydia Dean Pilcher, and director and writer George C. “And I give Rebecca a lot of credit for her relentless pursuit of what happened to Henrietta. “Rose was wonderful to work with,” says Oprah. “But I tried to stay in the center of it-in the heart of a daughter who is frustrated, manic, depressed, working multiple jobs, and wanting to know who her mother was.” Costars Rose Byrne (left ) and Oprah with Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, in Baltimore. “This story is deep and wide,” Oprah says. A look at one woman’s journey from ordinary to legendary.Ĭlockwise from top left: Renée Elise Goldsberry re-creates a moment captured in a rare photograph of Henrietta. Now she’s starring in the HBO adaptation (out April 22) alongside Rose Byrne. Seven years ago, Oprah was deeply moved by the astonishing book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the true account of a single patient who unwittingly transformed modern medicine.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |