Showtime Developing Limited Series About Lena Horne With Her Granddaughter Jenny Lumet & Alex Kurtzman
Peter White Television EditorThe life of entertainer and activist Lena Horne is to be turned into a limited series by Showtime with Alex Kurtzman and her granddaughter Jenny Lumet.The ViacomCBS-backed cable network is developing Blackbird: Lena Horne and America and will tell her story from dancing at the Cotton Club when she was 16, through World War II and stardom of the MGM years, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement and her triumphant return to Broadway.It will explore her relationships with Paul Robeson, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Joe Louis, Billie Holiday, Hattie McDaniel, Ava Gardner and Orson Welles and look at how she navigated stardom during Jim Crow as a direct descendant of slaves and their enslavers.