The British star of Harriet, the new biopic of the great slave-turned-emancipator Harriet Tubman, Erivo first conquered Broadway - and now has Hollywood at her feetYou would hesitate to call it an image problem, but the anti-slavery activist Harriet Tubman has had some representation issues lately. In May, the Trump administration abruptly postponed plans to feature Tubman on the new $20 bill. She would have been the first African American to appear on a US banknote, and the first woman in 150 years. The Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, made excuses about `security issues`; Donald Trump had already described the plan, hatched in the Obama era, as `pure political correctness`.In this light, a biopic of Tubman should be something to applaud, although the fact that the movie, Harriet, is the first major film about her (and took 25 years to reach the screen) tells its own story about representation. As does the screenwriter Gregory Allen Howard´s recent revelation that, when he was first pitching the story, one studio suggested the ideal actor to play Tubman would be Julia Roberts. Continue reading...
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