![]() 26, the biopic is the latest in a series of portrayals of Lady Day and her music that date back decades. “It’s about how we African-American folks love this country that doesn’t really love us back.”ĭirected by Lee Daniels, the film reveals how Anslinger doggedly pursued Holiday (played by the Grammy-nominated vocalist Andra Day) ostensibly for her drug use, but really because she refused to stop singing “ Strange Fruit,” the haunting and visceral anti-lynching anthem that has become one of the most famous protest songs of all time. ![]() “The story is about how this woman, this icon, was much too outspoken, and so the government came after her,” Parks said in a phone interview. Anslinger, the unabashedly racist head of the now-defunct Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Billie Holiday,” Parks, who wrote the screenplay, really gets into it, placing many of Holiday’s better-known battles - with heroin addiction, Jim Crow-era racism, and a seemingly endless string of swindlers and cads - in the context of her lesser-known struggles with Harry J. In the forthcoming drama “ The United States vs. When Parks was growing up, she said, “our parents would tell us, ‘She had a tragic story.’ And then, as we got a little older, ‘She used drugs.’ And then as we got a little older, my mom would start saying things like, you know, they got to her. ![]() For the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, the story of Billie Holiday, the legendary jazz singer, came to her in dribs and drabs.
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