Danny Glover, Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey
Steven Spielberg directs Alice Walker’s classic novel about the struggles of a young African-American woman in pre-Civil Rights Georgia.
Far and away Spielberg’s most female-centric film, The Color Purple‘s tenderness is touching and redemptive. An all star cast was the ace up his sleeve – including Danny Glover and Oprah Winfrey, led by a terrific, Oscar-nominated Whoopi Goldberg as Walker’s heroine, Celie – attesting to the importance of Walker’s seminal Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the screen.
This is the rare Hollywood film that seeks to show the difficulty of African-American lives in the first half of the twentieth century. Rural Georgia is the backdrop as we follow the painful trials of Celie, suffering through violence, abuse and the traumatic loss of her child, through racism and chauvinism, only to emerge unbroken and healed.
Nominated for ten Oscars, The Color Purple heralded Goldberg’s arrival as a major actor in what Roger Ebert described as ‘one of the most amazing debut performances in movie history’.
With thanks to the BFI