Her Point Of View
T Singapore: The New York Times Style Magazine|October 2020
This year, with her lead role in Netflix’s “Hollywood,” the actress Laura Harrier rewrote the erasure of accomplished women of colour in film history — and wants to help write a progressive future for the flawed industry by speaking her truth.
Terence Poh
Her Point Of View
In May 2020, Ryan Murphy’s miniseries, “Hollywood,” premiered on Netflix, starring the American actress Laura Harrier. Playing Camille Washington, Harrier manifests on screen a familiar picture, set in the 1940s, of women of colour in the film industry: a Black Hollywood starlet frequently typecast in supporting, comic-relief roles in white-led films. Yet Camille eventually scores the lead role for a film written by a Black screenwriter, produced by a major Hollywood studio.

Among the unfulfilled ambitions that Murphy explored and reimagined in his alt-history period series is an industry-wide undermining of the black community’s successes in film. The character of Camille — based on the true story of the Oscar-nominated actress Dorothy Dandridge, a bitter truth Murphy rewrote — is christened, in the finale, at the 1948 Oscars. She gains access into the theatre venue, sits front-row, and receives the award in a long, pink tulle dress — a series of events Dandridge never experienced in reality.

This story is from the October 2020 edition of T Singapore: The New York Times Style Magazine.

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This story is from the October 2020 edition of T Singapore: The New York Times Style Magazine.

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