Cynthia Onyedinmanasu Chinasaokwu Erivo (born 8 January 1987) is an English actress, singer, and songwriter.
She is known for her performance as Celie in the Broadway revival of The Color Purple, for which she won the 2016 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Musical, the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album, and the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Musical Performance in a Daytime Program, the latter two she shared with the rest of the cast.
Erivo ventured into films in 2018, with roles in the heist film Widows and the thriller Bad Times at the El Royale. In 2019, she portrayed abolitionist Harriet Tubman in the biopic Harriet, for which she earned nominations for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
‘Grandpa Was An Emperor’ Documentary Exec Produced By Cynthia Erivo Sets Freestyle Release
deadline.comEXCLUSIVE: Freestyle Digital Media has acquired North American VOD rights to the documentary Grandpa Was An Emperor from director Constance Marks, whose last feature, Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey, won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance.
The new film, which premiered to rave reviews at the DOC NYC Festival in 2021, is set for theatrical engagement in Los Angeles from April 7-13 at Laemmles Town Center in Encino, with evening showings on the 7th and 8th to be followed by Q&As with Marks, as well as her fellow producers and talent.
It’s set for release on digital on May 30. Exec produced by 2x Academy Award nominee Cynthia Erivo, Grandpa Was An Emperor follows Yeshi Kassa, great-granddaughter of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, as she embarks on a personal quest to discover what happened to her closest relatives during the coup of 1974.
While Yeshi and her older sister were thousands of miles away in a British boarding school, her great-grandfather was deposed by a revolution, setting off a harrowing chain of events that would put her parents and siblings in grave danger.
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