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.
‘Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker’: TV Review
variety.comLast year, the director Kasi Lemmons did something interesting, if not consistently successful, with the character of Harriet Tubman: She turned her into a modern action hero.
Lemmons’s film “Harriet” had the beats and the posture towards its audience of a thrill-ride multiplex feature, but set in the 19th-century South instead of the present day and starring Cynthia Erivo instead of, say, Liam Neeson.
Similarly, Lemmons’s new television project, “Self Made” — which she executive produced and episodes of which she directed — recasts a figure from black history in the argot of the present-day; though characters in the story of hair-care pioneer Madam C.J.
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