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.
Raphael Saadiq on Recreating Aretha Franklin’s Classic Music for ‘Genius’: ‘Aretha Was the LeBron James in the Room’
variety.comChris Willman Music WriterThere is even more genius to go around in the story that “Genius: Aretha Franklin” tells than just Aretha’s own.
Her classic records wouldn’t have stood the test of more than four and five decades without the chemistry she and her voice formed with the musicians that gave the music its masterful groove.
In portraying Franklin, Cynthia Erivo had the most herculean task in making the six-episode Nat Geo series, which is now up for on-demand streaming on Hulu.
But the show’s executive music producer, Raphael Saadiq, had a considerable one, too, in coming up with tracks that really sounded like the famous players of Muscle Shoals and not musical shills.Says Anthony Hemingway, the executive producer and one of the.
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