Hudson to Play Nelson Mandela’s Ex-Wife

LOS ANGELES: Oscar-winning actress and singer Jennifer Hudson is to play the role of Winnie Mandela, the controversy-plagued ex-wife of South Africa’s first black president Nelson Mandela in a new movie called Winnie, Variety reported on Wednesday.

The film is based on the Anne Marie du Preez Bezdrob biography, Winnie Mandela: A Life, according to Variety.

Production is scheduled to begin May 30 in the South African locations of Johannesburg, Cape Town, Transkei and Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela served 18 of his 27 years of imprisonment.

The movie is the second about the Mandelas this year, with Morgan Freeman set to star as the iconic president in the Clint Eastwood film Invictus, which is due in cinemas in December.

Hudson, who is expected to sing the film’s theme song, won the Oscar for her screen debut in Dreamgirls and followed with The Secret Life of Bees and Sex in the City.

“I was compelled and moved when I read the script,” Hudson said. “Winnie Mandela is a complex and extraordinary woman and I’m honoured to be the actress asked to portray her. This is a powerful part of history that should be told.”

Winnie Mandela was a fierce opponent to apartheid alongside her husband before the end of the racist regime. But she was tarnished by an association with a bodyguard who murdered a 14-year-old alleged informer in 1989. The Mandelas divorced in 1996 and she was convicted of fraud in 2003 for stealing from a funeral fund.

Winnie will be directed by Darrell J. Roodt, the veteran South African filmmaker whose 2006 film Yesterday was Africa’s Best Foreign Film nominee, and who also directed Cry, The Beloved Country and Sarafina!

No Racism, The Primary Issue in The Criticism: Obama

WASHINGTON : US President Barack Obama doesn’t think racism is an “overriding issue” in criticism of his polices, according to TV interviews to be broadcast Sunday as part of a media blitz pushing the White House’s health care reform.
“Are there people out there who don’t like me because of race? I’m sure there are. That’s not the overriding issue here,” Obama insisted in an excerpt of an interview to be broadcast on the CNN show “State of the Union.”

The US leader, in a bid to shore-up popular support for health care reform, is taking to all five major Sunday news shows this weekend, after commandeering prime-time television earlier this month with a major address to Congress on the issue.

Obama has been prompted to weigh in on the controversial issue of race after former president Jimmy Carter claimed racism was driving demonstrations and rhetoric on the president’s health care reform plans and spending policy.

“The overwhelming part of the American population” is more concerned with how the health care reform proposals will affect them, Obama said according to an interview excerpt released by ABC News.

“There’s been a long-standing debate in this country that is usually that much more fierce during times of transition or when presidents are trying to bring about big changes,” Obama told CNN, in an excerpt released Friday by the news network. “The things that were said about FDR (former US president Franklin Roosevelt) are pretty similar to the things that are said about me — he was a communist, he was a socialist,” Obama said.

“Things that were said about (former US president) Ronald Reagan when he was trying to reverse some of the New Deal programs were pretty vicious as well,” he added.

Obama’s spokesman Robert Gibbs moved this week to calm temperatures after Carter said much of the criticism leveled at Obama, America’s first black president, was the result of racism.

“The president does not believe that the criticism comes based on the color of his skin,” Gibbs said.