Jennifer Hudson (born September 12, 1981) is an American singer, actress and spokesperson. As an actress, she made her film debut portraying Effie White in Dreamgirls, for which she gained worldwide acclaim and won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a BAFTA Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Supporting Actress. In 2015, she made her Broadway debut in the role of Shug Avery in the revival of The Color Purple. Her debut album Jennifer Hudson, released in 2008, debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 and was certified gold by the RIAA, with sales exceeding a million copies worldwide. The record was nominated for four Grammy Awards, winning the 2009 Grammy Award for Best R&B Album. She also became the principal singer of The Color Purple musical album, which earned her the 2017 Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album and a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Musical Performance in a Daytime Program (shared with the cast of The Color Purple). In 2016, Hudson was announced as a coach on the 2017 Series of The Voice UK, where she became the first female coach to win. (More from Wikipedia)
The saga of the Supremes formed much of the story line for the hit musical Dreamgirls. The musical opened on Broadway in 1981 and won 6 Tony Awards. Twenty-five years later, in 2006, Dreamgirls was made into a popular film starring Jamie Foxx, Beyoncé Knowles, Eddie Murphy, and (fresh from finishing as a finalist on American Idol) Jennifer Hudson. At $80 million, Dreamgirls is the most expensive film ever to feature an all–African-American starring cast.
Dreamgirls created drama at the Oscars that year to match what was being portrayed on the screen. Despite not being nominated for Best Director or Best Picture (or any nominations for Best Actor or Best Actress either, for that matter), Dreamgirls had the most Academy Award nominations in 2007 with eight – a first at the Academy Awards. In a rare feat for an actor in a debut role, Jennifer Hudson was named Best Supporting Actress, but Eddie Murphy’s loss to Alan Arkin (for his role in the quirky and delightful comedy Little Miss Sunshine) as Best Supporting Actor was regarded as an upset. Three of the songs from Dreamgirls were nominated for Best Song, but they also lost out to the Melissa Etheridge song “I Need to Wake Up” from the Al Gore documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth.
It was a different story at the Golden Globes, where both Jennifer Hudson and Eddie Murphy won in their categories, and Dreamgirls took the award for Best Picture – Comedy or Musical; Beyoncé Knowles was also nominated for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical.
If you ask me, the insistence on having only one category of film or performer is a major flaw at the Academy Awards, and the recent decision to multiply the nominations for Best Picture to 10 or 12 only highlights the problem. The Golden Globes is a more enjoyable television experience than the Oscars nearly every year; each Golden Globe actually means something, in contrast to the parade of technical awards that almost no one cares about that composes the middle two-thirds of the Academy Awards show.
(April 2015/1)
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