(The 1979 disco-flavored “La Diva” was the poorest-selling album of her classic Atlantic Records years and deserved to be.) ![]() Franklin the Mayfield songs provided a potent albeit brief return to form for the rest of that decade she would flounder creatively and make some of her worst recordings. Franklin, pillars of ’60s soul at its height, returning to the kind of stripped-down R&B arrangements they (and almost everyone else in black music) had abandoned by 1972 or so. Intensifying the nostalgia at the heart of the project was the choice of soundtrack performer: It was Aretha Franklin, with her powerful voice, not the actresses who performed the songs in the film, who was asked to record the album. Mayfield, one of soul music’s most gifted singer-songwriters, to compose a score that echoed the innocence and desire of the kind of early-’60s hits he’d written for his group, the Impressions, and many others. But where “Dreamgirls” used a painfully weak pseudo-R&B score to tell its tale of a star-crossed female vocal group, “Sparkle” employed Mr. The film predates the much more celebrated Broadway retro-soul musical “Dreamgirls” by five years. “Sparkle” represented an early example of nostalgia for the soul era, though the movie was just a scant decade removed from the genre’s artistic and commercial peak. The innovations that hip-hop and Prince would introduce to black popular music were still years away. ![]() Soul music, a passionate melding of gospel vocal styles and secular subject matter, was ebbing as a force while dance grooves anchored by self-contained bands or disco studio ensembles took over as the hippest sounds on the radio. Vance’s Corey, in August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences.The first “Sparkle” arrived at a particularly fraught time in black American culture. The distinguished Alice received her Tony for best featured actress in a play in 1987 for her turn as Rose, wife of James Earl Jones’ Troy and mother of Courtney B. To explain the change in appearance, it was noted that The Oracle’s outer shell had been destroyed by the criminal program known as the Merovingian. “Only in her mid-30s when she played the role, Alice beautifully crystallized - and saluted - all the mothers who went the extra mile for their children,” Bob McCann wrote in 2009’s Encyclopedia of African American Actresses in Film and Television.Īfter Gloria Foster, who portrayed The Oracle in the first two Matrix movies, died in 2001, Alice stepped in to lead the way to enlightenment in The Matrix Revolutions (2003). (In her final role, Whitney Houston played the character in the 2012 reboot.) In the cult favorite Sparkle (1976), the Harlem-set rags-to-riches story inspired by The Supremes, Alice was memorable as Effie, the single mom raising daughters played by Irene Cara, Lonette McKee and Dwan Smith. She also played dorm director Lettie Bostic in 1988-89 on the first two seasons of NBC’s A Different World the mother of Oprah Winfrey’s Mattie Michael in 1989 on the ABC miniseries The Women of Brewster Place and the mother of Harold Perrineau Jr.’s Augustus Hill in 2002 on HBO’s Oz. The onetime Chicago schoolteacher received back-to-back Emmy nominations in 1992 and ’93 - winning in the second year - for her supporting turn as Marguerite Peck, whose child is murdered, on the Atlanta-set NBC legal drama I’ll Fly Away, starring Sam Waterston and Regina Taylor. In 1990 films, Alice played Nurse Margaret opposite Robin Williams and Robert De Niro in Awakenings, directed by Penny Marshall the family matriarch dealing with a disruptive guest ( Danny Glover) in Charles Burnett’s To Sleep With Anger and a woman whose son was struck by a car in the South Bronx in Brian De Palma’s The Bonfire of the Vanities.Įvents of the Week: Kering Foundation Dinner, 'The Continental' and More ![]() ![]() She was 85.Īlice died Wednesday in her Manhattan apartment, an NYPD spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter. Mary Alice, the Tony- and Emmy-winning actress who starred in the original Broadway production of Fences, portrayed the mother of three singing daughters in Sparkle and appeared as The Oracle in The Matrix Revolutions, has died.
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