Emmy victor and Oscar nominee Oprah Winfrey (Selma, The Color Purple) will star in HBO Films’ The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, based on Rebecca Skloot’s acclaimed bestselling nonfiction book of the same name.
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Henrietta Lacks, a native of Roanoke, Va., was living in the Turner Station community when she checked into Hopkins for treatment; she was diagnosed with cervical cancer.
HBO announced Winfrey’s casting earlier today, along with the news that filming would begin this summer. Wolfe will direct from his screenplay.
Winfrey, Alan Ball, Peter Macdissi, Carla Gardini and Lydia Dean Pilcher will executive produce, and Skloot will co-executive produce the film, which is a production of Your Face Goes Here Entertainment, Harpo Films and Cine Mosaic.
“She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells-taken without her knowledge in 1951-became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization and more”, the book’s official site says. Oprah will star as Henrietta Lacks’ daughter, Deborah Lacks, who spends much of her adult life trying to reconnect with the memory of her mother, whom she never met. Lacks died in 1951, but her relationship to the medical industry’s shoddy history of ethics and discrimination has lived on and will now be shared with American audiences.
This has been a passion project for Winfrey for the past six years.
Henrietta Lacks’ sons Zakariyya Rahman and David Lacks, Jr., as well as granddaughter Jeri Lacksare will serve as consultants on the HBO project.
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In the meantime, Winfrey can next be seen in OWN’s religious drama, Greenleaf, which marks her first recurring gig for scripted TV in more than two decades.
