Queen Latifah Talks Racist Treatment Received by 'Gone With the Wind' Star Hattie McDaniel at Oscars
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The ‘Living Single’ star urges people not to celebrate ‘Gone With the Wind’ for Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar win because the black actress received horrendous discriminations at the awards show.
Jun 17, 2020
AceShowbiz – Queen Latifah has mixed emotions about the decision by HBO Max bosses to reinstate “Gone with the Wind” because the 1939 film is often wrongly considered a civil rights success story due to Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar win.
The movie was pulled from the new streaming service earlier this month, June 2020 after film critics suggested the racist and slavery undertones of the story were too much for the current era following weeks of Black Lives Matter protests.
African-American filmmaker Spike Lee urged HBO Max bosses to reconsider and now the film will return to the site with an introduction from Jacqueline Stewart, a Cinema and Media Studies professor at the University of Chicago in Illinois.
But Latifah, who portrayed “Gone With the Wind” star McDaniel in Ryan Murphy’s Netflix hit “Hollywood”, feels viewers should also be educated on Hattie’s role in the 1939 film, which earned her the first Academy Award for an African-American.
“They didn’t even let her in the theatre until right before she got that award,” the “Chicago” star says. “Someone came outside and brought her into the auditorium. She wasn’t even allowed to sit in there.”
“And then she had to read a speech that was written by a studio. You know that’s not what the hell she wanted to say…”
“Then after that, all she could do was play the same kinds of roles…, so the opportunities at that time and the way that those in power in that business were relegating us and marginalising us and not allowing us to grow and thrive after that was just terrible. And a lot of that is still around today.”
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