Zoe Saldana -vs- Nina Simone
By Alex Delon <filmfestivals.com>
Actress Zoe Saldana who will be interpreting the late Jazz legend Nina Simone on screen in a new biopic to be released in April has been attacked by members of the black community as "being too light skinned" for the role. Her basic response is "see the film before you start judging me".
The 36 year old star of "Avatar" and "Star Trek" plays pianist, singer and activist Nina Simone in the forthcoming biopic "Nina."
The basic bone of contention in the hullabaloo surrounding the as yet unseen film is that Zoe, bears no physical resemblance to Simone. Zoe is of Porto Rican and Dominican Afro-Caribbean descent with a light complexion, whereas Nina had a much darker complexion and was of good old mainland slavery Afro-American extraction.
Wrong geography, wrong ethnicity, wrong last name, wrong accent, and wrong skin color. To put it plainly, too white. But not only that, too acceptable to the white community against whose racism Nina Simone struggled and protested all of her life. Ms. Saldana has been seen in major roles as an Alien in Avatar and a future space traveler in Star Trek which does not exactly fit the classic black Simone profile in the view of blacker-than-thee protesters who are planning to boycott the picture.
One prominent objector, a brother of the singer, had this to say: "The choice of an actress of 'ambiguous skin color' is an insult to Nina and her lifetime battle against racism". Other critical quibbles focus on her use of a prosthetic nose and heavy makeup. One cannot help but think of the prosthetic nose employed by Nicole Kidman to portray Virginia Wolf in "The Hours" in 2002, which earned her a Best Actress Oscar despite the fact that she did not even remotely resemble the famous writer. One could easily fill a page with the names of actors who have convincingly portrayed famous people they did not resemble physically by capturing the essence of the personality of the person in question. Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone's Nixon to start with ...
The physical resemblance argument carries little weight and clearly conceals darker motives.
Zoe's response to this unexpected wave of black protest: "Of course this is all very painful to hear, but I am above all an artist and I am not here to please everybody. The role of Nina is a great challenge and as one who had great respect for her I am merely trying to tell a story that needs to be told. In my opinion this is a kind of racism itself --
To put it in Nina's own words, 'Freedom is not being afraid to do what you have to do' --"
The distributor of the film, Robert L. Johnson, who is also the founder of Black Entertainment Television says: "These are themselves racist attacks, and paradoxically so, coming from some of the people who were closest to her". What we are seeing here is an example of racism in reverse!"
British Actor David Oyelowo who costars with Zoe in the Nina film and has been in high demand ever since the success of "Selma" last year in which he portrayed Martin Luther King, is one of her staunchest supporters. Quips Oyelowo: "Soon they'll be saying I'm not fit for my role in this picture because I was born in Oxford, England".
Anyway you look at it, with the smashing portrayal of Miles Davis by Don Cheadles at Berlin in January, and now a Nina Simone biopic in the offing, 2016 is shaping up as a banner year for Afro-American jazz legends on screen.
One wonders if Zoe were to follow this up with a Biopic about an earlier Afro-american singer of legend, Lena Horne, whether her current hecklers would claim she was too Black to play Lena.
Lena Horne (1917 - 2010) was a megastar Afro-American singer of the forties who skin was so light she could pass for white but always insisted on being identified as black!
Alex, bemused in Budapest
