What Did Oprah Do With The Money She Earned From Henriette Lacks Movie

Oprah Winfrey says she lives today without feeling rage — a great way to reduce stress, but potentially limiting if you're playing the pivotal character in a film about an emotionally scarred woman who is all but consumed by rage.

To get in touch with some visceral fury, Winfrey reached out to one of the students at the South African leadership academy she famously endowed — and asked her to recount her experiences with an aunt who had beaten her. Winfrey, too, had been beaten as a child, but time and other sources of healing have blocked the pain to the point where, as she puts it, there was no "charge" left for her to draw upon for the role.

"Hearing someone else talk about their beatings, I could have great empathy, great compassion, great sorrow and sadness," says Winfrey — not to mention an explosive sense of indignation, which she found immensely helpful in conjuring a daughter struggling to come to grips with the fate of her long-dead mother in "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," an HBO movie that premieres April 22 at 8 p.m.

Directed and largely written by George C. Wolfe, it is based on the best-selling 2010 nonfiction book of that title by Rebecca Skloot. It's easy to see what the attraction was for the 63-year-old Winfrey, in one of her acting forays. Her last movie role was in 2014's "Selma," and she appeared in the 2016 drama series "Greenleaf" on her TV network, OWN.

In collaboration with HBO, she took the Lacks project to Wolfe, a theater veteran. The film — which features Rose Byrne as Skloot, as well as Renée Elise Goldsberry, Reg Cathey, Courtney Vance and Leslie Uggams — tracks a reporter's investigation into the life of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman who died in obscurity in Baltimore in 1951 but who posthumously became world-renowned.

Scientists found that the cells cultured from her tumor samples didn't readily die off, and could reproduce again and again. As a result, these valuable cell lines have been instrumental in dozens of medical breakthroughs for cancer, AIDS and other diseases. That cell culture is still in use to this day. It is known to research labs and biotechnology companies worldwide by HeLa, Henrietta's abbreviated name.

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"I felt a genuine desire to share this story, because this is a name that people should know," says Winfrey says in a telephone interview from her home in Santa Barbara.

"It's an astonishing performance," says Wolfe in a separate conversation. "There's a power to her and a ferocity to her."

Winfrey takes her deep dive into rage while portraying Henrietta's youngest daughter, Deborah (sometimes called Dale), a woman disordered by grief and grievance. Although her mother's cells have an enduring purpose, Deborah can't find any deep meaning for her own life.

Renée Elise Goldsberry stars as Henrietta Lacks. (Quantrell Colbert/ HBO) — Renée Elise Goldsberry plays Henrietta in flashbacks. (Quantrell Colbert/ HBO)

Goldsberry, a Tony winner for her portrayal of Angelica Schuyler in the Broadway musical "Hamilton," plays Henrietta in flashback sequences.

Byrne's Skloot, sensing the inequity of a medical establishment profiting from Henrietta's unwitting bequest but offering no compensation to her struggling descendants, persuades the erratic Deborah to team up with her to excavate material for the book. (The fight over Henrietta's legacy has created bitter rifts among her survivors, although people involved in making the movie say the feud had no effect on it.)

So it's actually the stories of two women, separated by death. By way of Deborah, the movie is about a citizen seeking redress from powerful institutions. The medical world, represented here by Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University, where Henrietta was treated and her tumor removed, is not excused from criticism, although the movie doesn't look for villains.

Through Henrietta, the film enlarges on a positive notion that one person can contribute to the betterment of humankind in a way that transcends one's modest circumstances.

Director George C. Wolfe on the set of "The Immortal Life of HenriettaLacks."(Quantrell Colbert/HBO) — Director George C. Wolfe on the set. (Quantrell Colbert/HBO)

"It is a story of economic injustice," Wolfe says at a Manhattan media studio where "Henrietta Lacks" was edited. "But the movie is also about taking this person from abstraction and (reclaiming) her as a tangible human being. One of the things that I really love is that — in 1951, on paper — one of the least powerful people you could be is a moderate-income black woman. And yet HeLa was so powerful."

What got to Winfrey was less the science than the search. "(Deborah's) thing was not about the money," the actress says. "It was, 'I just want to figure out who my mother was.' "

The effort to translate Skloot's book to the screen had several false starts before Wolfe came on board, but for the author herself, the most "mind-bending" point was when Winfrey signed on. Deborah, who died in 2009 just before the book was published, "wanted nothing more than the story to go out into the world," Skloot says. "And she said for years she wanted Oprah to play her in the movie."

Deborah Lacks Pullum had a highly developed sense of drama, and Winfrey managed to convey it, Skloot says. Watching it, viewers get a potent sense of Deborah's appetite for the truth.

Shot in rural Georgia and Baltimore (Johns Hopkins allowed its facilities to be used), the movie offered opportunities that the actors found irresistible. Byrne, who only recently gave birth to a baby, was inclined to pass on the role, but the film revealed the relationship between a reporter and subject so intimate she couldn't resist. "I'm such a snoop," says the actress. "I could have missed my calling."

Cathey, a veteran of "The Wire" and "House of Cards," plays Deborah's younger brother, Zakariyya." Vance was cast as a charlatan legal adviser who tries to bilk Henrietta's survivors.

Renée Elise Goldsberry, right, who won a Tony for — Goldsberry, right, who plays Henrietta, won a Tony for "Hamilton" on Broadway. (Quantrell Colbert/HBO)

The mission to inform a wider audience was confirmed in the number of cast members who had no idea who Lacks was. "I'm a voracious reader, so I didn't understand how I missed this," says Uggams, who plays one of Henrietta's surviving cousins. "And then I read the book, and I was stunned by the whole thing."

Like other cast members, Goldsberry saw a larger purpose in telling the story. "I felt that the story is bigger than the performances," she says, "bigger than any particular group of people."

Winfrey herself professes amazement at not having heard of Lacks' story earlier. "I lived in that town for eight years!" she says, referring to her work as a reporter at a television station in Baltimore, where Lacks died. "We owe a lot to Rebecca Skloot, "Had she not been persistent, we would not know the story."

'THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS'

Premieres: 8 p.m. April 22, HBO