“When I thought of Billie Holiday, I just thought of her as a jazz singer, maybe a troubled artist, you hear about drugs, a little bit of trouble with the law,” says Lee Daniels, director of the upcoming biopic The United States vs.
Billie Holiday. With all that Holiday accomplished during her storied career, rarely highlighted is her work in the civil rights movement of the 1930s and ’40s, which was why Daniels was inspired to tackle this project.Written by Suzan-Lori Parks, the pic is set in 1940s New York City at a time when the federal government targeted Holiday for her drug use, ultimately aiming to stop her from singing her controversial ballad “Strange Fruit.”“Through this story, we learn about her singing ‘Strange Fruit,’ which was
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