Cynthia Onyedinmanasu Chinasaokwu Erivo (born 8 January 1987) is an English actress, singer, and songwriter.
She is known for her performance as Celie in the Broadway revival of The Color Purple, for which she won the 2016 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Musical, the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album, and the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Musical Performance in a Daytime Program, the latter two she shared with the rest of the cast.
Erivo ventured into films in 2018, with roles in the heist film Widows and the thriller Bad Times at the El Royale. In 2019, she portrayed abolitionist Harriet Tubman in the biopic Harriet, for which she earned nominations for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
Disney’s live-action retelling of Pinocchio, which will go out on Disney+, has added Oscar nominee Cynthia Erivo as the Blue Fairy and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the voice of Jiminy Cricket, Deadline has confirmed.
As Deadline first reported, Luke Evans is set to play the coachman in the Tom Hanks-as-Geppetto feature film being directed by Robert Zemeckis.In addition, Benjamin Evan Ainsworth (Flora and Ulysses) will voice the title character of Pinocchio, with Keegan-Michael Key as the voice of Honest John and Lorraine Bracco as Sofia the Seagull, a new character, in the live-action update of the 1940 Disney animated classic, which will also combine VFX.Zemeckis is directing off a script he wrote with Chris Weitz.
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