Some say she shouldn’t have even tried. The others celebrate Marisa Abela, the leading actress in the Amy Winehouse film “Back to Black”, because she is very close to the unique soul singer. Both factions agree on one point: it is impossible to play a woman, who sang for her life in every song like Winehouse, who died at the age of 27 with a blood alcohol level of 4.16.
Playing with our expectations is probably the reason why biopics have been so successful in recent years: Can he or she bring the often tragic stars in all their conflict to the screen? And above all: can the actors also sing just as well? We will see more of these debates, which flare up again every time a film is released, because the boom in musical biopics is far from ending. Fans are already happy and annoyed about film adaptations of Michael Jackson’s life – his actor Jaafar Jackson received good reviews in advance because he looks so much like the King of Pop. No wonder: he is Jackson’s nephew. Also in the pipeline: films about Bob Dylan (leading role: Timothée Chalamet), Bruce Springsteen (leading role: Jeremy Allen White), Madonna, Cher, the LSD rockers Grateful Dead, the Bee Gees and four productions about the Beatles – for everyone Mushroom head one.
But the cinema biographies offer the actors the opportunity to do more than just open their mouths. Such roles are also often rewarded with nominations for film awards. And so in recent years some stars have dared to approach Elvis, Whitney Houston, Freddie Mercury and Udo Lindenberg. We compare original and fake…