Latifah reaches out in fact-based ‘Life Support’
Elegantly coiffed and dressed, Queen Latifah fits right into her current surroundings, a luxury hotel suite in Southern California. At age 36, the former “queen of hip-hop” has a Grammy Award and an Oscar nomination to her credit, which helps explain the aura of calm self-confidence surrounding her.
If she’s sitting pretty at the moment, however, Latifah still hasn’t forgotten a time when her life could have gone in a very different direction.
It was those memories, she explains, that made her feel compelled to star in and be the executive producer of “Life Support,” an HBO film premiering at 8 p.m. Saturday. The fact-based project casts Latifah as HIV-positive wife and mother Ana Willis, a recovering addict who pours her anger and regrets into working for an AIDS outreach group in Brooklyn, N.Y.
The story is largely drawn from the life of Andrea Williams, the sister of “Life Support” director and co-writer Nelson George, but Latifah says she recognized the characters in the script even before she met Williams.
“I grew up around them,” she says. “I grew up in New Jersey, but during my wild days I spent plenty of time in New York. I know these streets, and I know how these kinds of things happen. I know how you can drift into experimenting with drugs and how families can be fractured by addiction to drugs.”
She knows she was one of the lucky ones, both for pulling herself back from the brink and for having a safe haven at home to which she could retreat. That’s an option far too many urban teens don’t have, Latifah says.
While she is relieved that HIV infection no longer is an automatic death sentence, Latifah says she fears that for many people, the threat of AIDS has become minimized.
“It’s certainly true that there is a devastating epidemic going on in Africa, but there truly is an epidemic here in America too, and we aren’t even taking care of ourselves here. It’s definitely bad over in Africa, because the basic infrastructure is just not in place, but we need to focus on our country as well.”
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-- Tribune Media Services