She may have won an Oscar for Dreamgirls, but since then Jennifer Hudson’s most high-profile acting assignment was a relatively small supporting role in Sex & the City (she also appeared in The Secret Life Of Bees). Of course her life also took an unexpected and tragic turn last year, when her mother, brother and nephew were murdered. However now she’s preparing to take on her toughest acting challenge yet, playing Nelson Mandela’s former wife, Winnie, in a biopic named after its protagonist.
The film is due to begin production next May on location in South Africa, under the direction of Darell J. Roodt (Yesterday, Cry The Beloved Country, Sarafina!). It’ll certainly be a tough assignment for Hudson, as Winnie is a complicated figure. During much of her husband’s imprisonment, she seemed a loyal and steadfast supporter of her husband, and was one of the main public faces of the struggle against apartheid when Nelson couldn’t be (she was jailed herself for a time).
However, her reputation was tarnished by association with a bodyguard who murdered a 14-year old alleged informer, she was convicted of fraud, and she split from her husband only two years after his release from prison, due to accusations of continuing infidelity.
The new biopic plans to tell both the good and bad sides of this complicated figure, based on a script by Andre Pieterse, Roodt and Paul L. Johnson, which was adapted from Anne Marie du Preez Bezdrob biography, Winnie Mandela: A Life.
Of course soon we’ll get to see Morgan Freeman’s take on Nelson Mandela in Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, although that looks like it’ll be a more laudatory of his achievments than looking at the fact that Nelson is also a pretty complex person.
Let’s just hope Hudson perfects her South African accent between now and the time the cameras start rolling on Winnie.