The singer Aretha Franklin wanted to portray her in a biopic, long before Jennifer Hudson got the gig
Considering how many years, or decades, it took for the long-in-development Aretha Franklin biopic to finally get made, the box office performance of 2021’s Respect was pretty devastating, relegating it as another in a long line of recent biopic bombs.
Before her death in 2018, Franklin herself had spent about a dozen years working with producers on the project, hand-selecting singer/actress Jennifer Hudson for the role after seeing her in the 2006 film Dreamgirls. Even before that, however, she had been vocally pitching the idea of a movie or TV series about her life for ages, going back to before Hudson was even on the scene.
In 2001, after watching a mini-series about the life of Judy Garland, Franklin tried to get the wheels turning again on her own dramatised life story, telling reporters, “Oh, we will see the Aretha Franklin telefilm, if not miniseries. We will see it someday”. When asked who she would prefer in the lead role at that point, however, she made a very unusual choice, naming the soul singer Natalie Cole, who was 50 years old at the time and only eight years younger than Aretha herself.
The selection seems all the more interesting when you consider how Cole spent much of her early career in the late 1970s trying to fend off comparisons to the ‘Queen of Soul’ and tabloid claims of a ‘rivalry’ between the two artists.
“I’m sick of talking about this so-called ‘rivalry’ between me and Aretha Franklin,” she told a reporter in 1977, “I don’t know what to do… I guess people will stop talking about it eventually because we don’t sing the same type of music. Not anymore.”
Cole, who already faced the added pressure that came with being the daughter of the legendary Nat King Cole, wasn’t having her best nepo-baby moment at the time of that interview, as she was still battling to establish herself as a unique voice.
“Maybe when I started there were a few similar songs here and there,” she added about the Aretha comparisons, “there may always be that. But there are a lot of chicks around who sound more like Aretha than I do… This thing with me and Aretha has been drawn out too long. She thinks I sound like she did when she first started, and that’s probably true. 15 years from now, maybe someone will sound like me.”
And indeed, there were some singers who sounded a bit like Natalie Cole in the 1990s, but it seems as though Franklin never quite moved on from her original conclusion that she did the best imitation of her younger voice, and that’s one of the reasons she was still nominating her to play her in a movie as late as 2001.
Franklin did reveal another, possibly more important reason in a 2007 interview with the Associated Press, when she bemoaned the lack of opportunities granted to Black women in Hollywood compared to white singers who’d often made the move from recording to acting.
“I look at the artists who came along at the same time I did, certainly other celebrated women like Dionne [Warwick] and Natalie [Cole] and Roberta Flack…people like that, they weren’t offered anything [in Hollywood] either. It’s just so unfair.”
Sadly, Aretha never got to see the film she’d spent so many years hoping to bring to fruition, and even though Respect wasn’t a great success, Hudson did the role and singer proud, earning a Screen Actors’ Guild nomination for ‘Best Actress in a Leading Role’ for her performance.
