(usartical) Oprah Winfrey talks about some of the challenges she had while working on the recently released musical version of The Color Purple. For Oprah Winfrey, The Color Purple has been a full circle experience.
The multifaceted star’s breakthrough performance as Sofia in the 1985 movie earned her an Oscar nomination. Almost forty years later, she is getting ready to release the Broadway show-based musical that she co-produced.
As Winfrey, 69, states to PEOPLE for this week’s cover story, “I’d never been to a movie set,” landing the role was like something out of a dream.
“Doing the [original] film was the most important thing that had ever happened to me and continues to be a central theme in my life,” she states.
Winfrey continues, “It’s as big a miracle as my whole life has been, because I didn’t know one single soul in the business.”
Whoopi Goldberg’s Best Actress and Best Picture nominations among the eleven Academy Awards that The Color Purple received in 1985, according to Winfrey, “is the reason I ended up owning my own show, why I learned to surrender, do the hardest work and then let that work go.”
“The Color Purple is why I created the culture at my company Harpo that I did, because I had seen at Steven Spielberg’s Amblin that you can own your own studio [and] make a family of your work,” she says. “That movie was a spiritual grounding for me.”
Based on novelist Alice Walker’s 1982 novel of the same name, Spielberg, 76, produced the 1982 film adaptation in addition to working with Winfrey as a producer.
The plot summary of Color Purple, which is scheduled for release in 2023, suggests a “musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel about the lifelong struggles of an African-American woman living in the South during the early 1900s.”
According to the synopsis, the movie is a “bold new take on the beloved classic” about “the extraordinary sisterhood of three women who share one unbreakable bond.”
The musical, which had music and lyrics by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray, and a book by Marsha Norman, was based on a script written by Marcus Gardley.
A star-studded cast that includes Danielle Brooks, Taraji P. Henson, Halle Bailey, Louis Gossett Jr., Corey Hawkins, David Alan Grier, Colman Domingo, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, H.E.R., Ciara, Jon Batiste, and Deon Cole features Fantasia Barrino as Celie in her feature film debut.
The “embodiment of self-empowerment” is how Winfrey describes Sofia, the character that Brooks, 34, plays in the new movie, and she feels “blessed” to be able to expose it to a new generation.
When asked her future plans, she responds, “Maya Angelou wrote a poem called ‘Continue’ for me. Among the