WEEK IN WOMEN: Regina King to Portray Shirley Chisholm – Brandy McDonnell reports
Even as she’s building Oscar buzz for her directorial debut One Night in Miami, Regina King is lining up another big starring role in front of the camera.
The Academy Award-winning performer (If Beale Street Could Talk) will portray trailblazing politician Shirley Chisholm — America’s first Black congresswoman — in the upcoming biopic Shirley.
The film will be produced by Participant and is expected to begin production later this year.
Written and directed by Oscar winner John Ridley (12 Years a Slave, Jimi: All Is by My Side), the biopic will chronicle Chisholm’s trailblazing 1972 presidential campaign. Although discrimination dogged her quest for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination — she was blocked from participating in televised primary debates and was allowed to make just one speech, and only after taking legal action — many students, women and minorities followed her “Chisholm Trail.”
Chisholm became in 1968 the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress, representing New York’s 12th congressional district for seven terms from 1969 to 1983. In 1972, she became the first woman and African American to seek the nomination for president of the United States from one of the two major political parties.
Ridley and King previously worked together on the television series American Crime. King twice won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or a Movie for that project.
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