By the time she died of a heroin overdose at the age of 44 on July 17, 1959, Billie Holiday (real name: Eleanora Fagan Gough, a.k.a., "Lady Day") was already a show business legend: a singer of great talent and emotional power also notorious for a tragic, tortured personal life. Death transformed the legend into romantic myth and, sooner or later, a cinematic biopic was inevitable. Unfortunately, the biopic that did emerge thirteen years after Lady Day's demise proved to be a bad, bombastic film. Much that is wrong with 'Lady Sings the Blues' can be traced to Motown Records mogul Berry Gordy's heavy-handed involvement (including total financing to the tune of $3.5 million). His screen writing team—Chris Clark, Suzanne de Passe, and Terence McCloy—were all Gordy cronies but none of them had written a screenplay before. Also highly suspect was the film's primary source material: Billie Holiday's alleged autobiography, co-authored with hack writer William F. Dufty: 'Lady Sings the Blues' (Doubleday, 1956). Holiday's own account of her life was filled with fabrications that the screenwriters blithely took at face value. No matter; the intent of the movie all along was not to serve historical accuracy but to function as the ultimate prestige star vehicle for Gordy's protégé Diana Ross, former Supremes lead singer, who had just embarked on a solo recording and film career and demanded that Gordy give her the juicy part of Lady Day. The fact that Ross had very little acting experience and did not look or sound anything like Billie Holiday, prompted critics to wonder aloud if she could carry the film. Surprisingly, she could, and did—after a fashion. Purely as melodrama, 'Lady' is a powerful experience. Though graced by numerous artistic triumphs, Billie Holiday's life was, without question, a nightmare roller coaster of drug addiction and withdrawal, police troubles, racial victimization, and unending bouts of sexual and emotional abuse by the men in her life, both intimates and strangers. In its clumsy, single-minded zeal to capture all the suffering and angst, the film goes too far. When all is said and done Diana Ross's Billie Holiday is the consummate victim-martyr and little else. Indeed, her spiritual and emotional pain is so constant, loud, intense, and insistent that the viewer drifts from stunned empathy, to pity, to compassion fatigue, to something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder. Striving with great earnestness for tragedy, 'Lady Sings the Blues' is finally nothing more than a protracted exercise in hysterical bathos. At first blush, the film was considered a great one in some quarters. Critics were politely wary but the public ate it up and the Motion Picture Academy—always attuned to popular sentiment—bestowed five 1973 Oscar nominations. The soundtrack album was a big hit as well. After 'Lady' failed to win any Oscars, it became apparent that the initial response had been overblown, much like the movie itself. Billy Dee Williams plays Holiday's husband, Louis McKay, and legendary comic Richard Pryer does a fine turn as Holiday's pianist but the show belongs almost entirely to Ross. VHS (1996) and DVD (2005).
Review of Lady Sings the Blues
