Lady Sings the Blues (1972) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error Lady Sings the Blues ( 1972 ) R | The story of the troubled life and career of the legendary Jazz singer, Billie Holiday. Director: a list of 42 titles created 16 Oct 2012 a list of 39 titles created 22 Jul 2013 a list of 30 titles created 12 Aug 2015 a list of 38 titles created 05 Nov 2015 a list of 30 titles created 20 Nov 2015 Title: Lady Sings the Blues (1972) 7.1/10 Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Nominated for 5 Oscars. Another 5 wins & 3 nominations.

See more awards » Photos Directors: Berry Gordy, Tony Richardson, and 1 more credit » Stars: Diana Ross, Billy Dee Williams, Anthony Perkins Richard Pryor is playing three different roles here. The first being a poor orange picker named Leroy Jones who gets laid off when by mistake he joins the worker's union during one of their... See full summary » Director: Michael Schultz After severely burning himself in a drug incident, a comedian has a near death experience in which he reviews his life. Director: Richard Pryor Tired of the slave-like treatment of his team's owner, charismatic star Negro League pitcher Bingo Long takes to the road with his band of barnstormers through the small towns of the Midwest in the 1930's. Director: John Badham At Madame Zenobia's illegal nightclub, when Steve Jackson and Wardell Franklin get robbed of their wallets containing a winning lottery ticket, they set out to recover it. Director: Sidney Poitier A girl group experiences turmoil after one of their members turns to drugs and another achieves their desired fame all by herself. Director: Sam O'Steen Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Josephine Baker was born poor, but achieved fame and fortune through her sizzlingly exotic and erotic performances.

Starting life on the American Vaudeville ... See full summary » Director: Brian Gibson The true life story of Wendell Scott, the first black stock car racing driver to win an upper tier NASCAR race. Director: Michael Schultz Joe Braxton is an ex-con who has been given a second chance to freedom after violating his probation. He has been hired by a school teacher named Vivian Perry to repair and drive an old ... See full summary » Directors: Oz Scott, Michael Schultz Stars: Richard Pryor, Cicely Tyson, Angel Ramirez Jr. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 6.8/10 X Goldie returns from five years at the state pen and winds up king of the pimping game. Trouble comes in the form of two corrupt white cops and a crime lord who wants him to return to the ... See full summary » Director: Michael Campus Based on the novel by Gloria Naylor, which deals with several strong-willed women who live in a rundown housing project on Brewster Place in an unidentified eastern city; across three ...

See full summary » Stars: Oprah Winfrey, Mary Alice, Olivia Cole Dave Anderson and Manny Durrell are two high-class sneak thieves who have never been caught. Joshua Burke is a retired detective who has enough evidence on the both of them to put them ... See full summary » Director: Sidney Poitier Edit Storyline Born Elinore Harris, Billie Holiday had a difficult teen and young adulthood period, which included working in brothels, both as a cleaning woman and a prostitute, and being raped. Through this difficulty, she dreamed of becoming a jazz singer. She got her initial singing break when she applied at a Harlem club that was looking for a dancer, but where she got hired as a singer. There, she met and fell in love with the suave Louis McKay . After this initial break, Billie wanted her singing career to move to the mainstream clubs in downtown Manhattan. She took a risk when she agreed to be the lead singer for the Reg Hanley Band, a primarily white group, who convinced her that she would have to make her mark in regional tours before her Manhattan dream could happen.

As Billie tried to advance her career, pressures of life, including being a black woman, led to her not so secret substance abuse (especially of heroin), not so secret because of her increasingly erratic behavior, both on ... Written by Huggo Diana Ross IS Billie Holiday See more » Genres: 12 October 1972 (USA) See more » Also Known As: El ocaso de una estrella See more » Filming Locations: Average Shot Length: 10.7 seconds. Median Shot Length: 10.3 seconds. See more » Quotes The movie was unfortunately not as good as Diana Ross. 27 May 2009 | by Lawson (Singapore) – See all my reviews The first question that would run across the mind of anyone who'd watch this movie is: "Can Diana Ross act?" The answer, I'm glad to say, is an unequivocal "Yes." And I think that's what the director wanted to clear up right from the very first scene, with a flash forward to Billie Holiday's drug bust while the credits were still on. Ms.

Ross, devoid of make-up and with "crazy hair," put on an extremely convincing performance of heroin (or coke) withdrawal, replete with howling. Her performance is the highlight of the movie, which unfortunately felt like it ran way too long, and I found myself constantly checking the run time. It wasn't bad as a musical. As I had read previously, Ms. Ross didn't seek to imitate Billie Holiday's style, and instead created a distinct and appropriate - yet similar - jazz style of her own just for the movie (check out "Good Morning Heartache"), and I, being a fan, didn't mind the song interludes. What dragged the movie was the constant focus on Holiday's drug addiction (to showcase more of Ms. Ross's acting?). It felt like there was scene after scene of her being drug-addled, whining, and screaming, which began to abrade after a while. It's too bad, since with better direction and screenplay, coupled with Ms. Ross's capable acting and singing, this could've been one of the truly great musical biopics. 7 of 8 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you?

Yes Michel Legrand, Gil Askey, Diana Ross - Lady Sings The Blues (1972 Film) - Amazon.com Music Lady Sings The Blues Page 1 of 1 Start over Sponsored Products are advertisements for products sold by merchants on Amazon.com. When you click on a Sponsored Product ad, you will be taken to an Amazon detail page where you can learn more about the product and purchase it. To learn more about Amazon Sponsored Products, click here . Ad feedback Special Offers and Product Promotions Save Big On Open-Box & Pre-owned: Buy "Lady Sings The Blues (1972 Film)â from Amazon Warehouse Deals and save 50% off the $9.98 list price. Product is eligible for Amazon's 30-day returns policy and Prime or FREE Shipping. See all Open-Box & Pre-owned offers from Amazon Warehouse Deals. Editorial Reviews Amazon.com Face it, when searching for female singers to portray the hard-knock life of troubled jazz legend Billie Holiday , Diana Ross's name shouldn't even have come to mind. But portray her she did, earning herself an Oscar nod in the process. The mother of all divas did Lady Day's legacy proud.

This soundtrack (which includes dialogue from the 1972 film) ain't Holiday, but it ain't bad; Ross is in fine and flavorful voice. She manages to both capture Holiday's idiosyncratic sound (which such pretenders to the throne as Erykah Badu have trampled on) and still sound enough like herself to satisfy her own legions of fans. She conjures up Holiday's vulnerability and phrasing without attempting to slavishly imitate. As an homage this works. --Amy Linden Track Listings 2. Lady Sings The Blues 3. Baltimore Brothel 4. Billie Sneaks Into Dean & Dean's Swingin Uptown 5. T'Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do 6. Big Ben, C.C. Rider 7. All Of Me 8. The Man I Love 9. Them There Eyes 12. God Bless The Child 13. I Cried For You (Now It's Your Turn To Cry Over Me) 14. Billie & Harry, Don't Explain 15. Mean To Me 17. What A Little Moonlight Can Do 18.

Louis Visits Billie On Tour, Love Theme 19. Cafe Manhattan Party 20. Persuasion, T'Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do 21. Agent's Office 22. Love Is Here To Stay 23. Fine And Mellow 24. Lover Man (Oh, Where Can You Be?) 25. You've Changed 26. Gimme A Pigfoot (And A Bottle Of Beer) 27. Good Morning Heartache 30. My Man (Mon Homme) 31. Don't Explain 32. I Cried For You (Now It's Your Turn To Cry Over Me) 33. Strange Fruit 34. God Bless The Child 35. Closing Theme Audio CD (April 13, 1992) Original Release Date: October 12, 1972 Number of Discs: 1 By Peter on October 5, 2004 Format: Audio CD I just heard this CD again this week after a long time. I must say this CD still stands the test of time, even after 30 years.

Diana Ross is to be commended for her superb interpretations of these Billie Holiday standards -- all classics. It must have seem daunting for Diana Ross to tackle the role of Billie Holiday in "Lady Sings the Blues". True, the movie took many knocks for sensationalizing the seedier aspects of Billie's drug use and promiscuity, but no one can knock Diana's performance in that movie. I still don't understand how Diana Ross lost the Best Actress Oscar to Liza Minnelli for "Cabaret" that year. Perhaps Hollywood was not yet ready to bestow an Oscar for Leading Actress to a black woman. That's the only reason. It took Halle Berry to finally win one almost 30 years later for "Monster's Ball", which paled in comparison to Ms. Ross's performance in "Lady Sings the Blues", but that's another story. My only quibble with this soundtrack is that Berry Gordy decided to instill snippets from the movie's dialogue into the soundtrack, which seems jarring when listening to the entire CD. But this is a soundtrack CD after all, so I guess Berry Gordy and Motown wanted it to be as authentic as it could. All the songs are standouts, but Ms.

Ross really shines in "Good Morning Heartache" (Motown released this as a single back in 1972) and probably her finest track "God Bless the Child". This is no mean feat since those songs are forever identified with Lady Day, but Diana manages to instill her own character into the song without robbing its essence. Certainly very, very praiseworthy. Ms. Ross also was in great voice during this period as a recording artist. Having gone solo a few years earlier from the Supremes, her voice is warm and supple with just the right amount of lilt, which makes interpreting these Lady Day classics a bonus to hear. Again, much praise indeed to "Lady Diana" for a great singing and acting job. Does anybody wanna know that Diana Ross has YET to win a Grammy? That's no joke! No Grammy and No Oscar. Is someone trying to send a message to Diana Ross ??? By Eric D.

Harris on August 23, 2000 Format: Audio CD I've never been partial to the movie for many reasons despite Diana Ross' stunning motion picture debut and well-deserved Oscar nomination, my main reason is the highly fictionalised account of the "love story" between Billie and Louis McKay (and the character "Piano Man", played by Richard Pryor; who was he supposed to be anyway? How about including in the script the story of the friendship between Lady and Pres, the inimitable Lester Young? The recordings on which he played tenor sax for Lady are masterpieces). Anyone who knows anything about Lady Day's life and times knows that this was not the case. Suffice it to say that Louis McKay was not a very nice person, although he was the best (and that's REALLY stretching that word) out of the three of Lady's husbands, the first being Jimmie Monroe, who may or may not have introduced Lady to heroin, and Joe Guy, Lady's second husband, though it's been widely publicized that the pair were never legally married.

The schmaltzy story that eventually did come out of Hollywood in 1972 made me cringe when I saw it because I read not only Lady's own account of her life ("Lady Sings The Blues", largely ghostwritten by William Dufty) but in later years several other excellent books about her as well, the best being "Wishing On The Moon" by Donald Clarke. The critical drubbing of the movie itself aside, I must admit that the music is simply stunning; this unto itself is my only recommendation with regard to the movie at all. Gil Askey's orchestration and Michel LeGrand's arrangements are absolutely top-notch, particularly LeGrand's own "Love Theme", played in various forms throughout the entire movie and on the soundtrack itself. The song is lush and gorgeous and never fails to take my breath away, and Diana Ross' singing is arguably the best of her career. Her phrasing and diction are eerily precise and razor-sharp; she totally distances herself from her Supremes work and even erects a wall seperating her solo efforts from this entirely new style of singing.

Diana never lapses into caricature while interpreting the songs of Lady Day, which a lesser singer most likely would have done because Billie's style was (and still is) so instantly recognizable and uniquely her own. Instead Diana chose to interpret Lady's songs in her own style and by doing so earned considerable critcal respect and establishing her formidable Jazz chops. Diana's versions of "Good Morning Heartache", "Lover Man", "Them There Eyes" and "The Man I Love" rival Billie's in terms of arrangement and musicianship. Personally I'd love to hear Ross, Askey and LeGrand on another project, particularly in a Jazz setting. All in all, this is an excellent soundtrack, more than worthy of a deserving home in anyone's collection. In my opinion, by all means buy this soundtrack but avoid the movie; if you want the real scoop on Billie Holiday, read her own autobiography or "Wishing On The Moon", and of course there are Lady's own magnificent recordings as well. These items will provide a better insight to the real Billie Holiday than "Lady Sings The Blues" (the movie) ever could or will.

Amazon.com: LADY SINGS THE BLUES: DIANA ROSS: Movies & TV LADY SINGS THE BLUES Unlimited Streaming with Amazon Prime Start your 30-day free trial to stream thousands of movies & TV shows included with Prime. Start your free trial See all buying options $17.88 + $3.99 shipping Only 1 left in stock. Ships from and sold by sherlockhome2 . Product Details Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #499,333 in Movies & TV ( See Top 100 in Movies & TV ) Editorial Reviews co stars Billy Dee Williams Customer Reviews HALL OF FAME TOP 1000 REVIEWER on September 15, 2004 Format: VHS Tape The most influential, creative, and emotional blues singer from the 1930s through 1959, Billie Holiday may have attracted a whole new generation of fans through this 1972 film biography.

Though the film is not historically accurate about her life and her relationship with Louis McKay (played by Billie Dee Williams), it is effective in demonstrating the traumas of her early life, the color bar which prevented her from singing in many whites-only venues, her drug and alcohol addictions (which eventually led to her death at age forty-four of liver and heart disease), and the events which led to many of her most famous songs. Diana Ross, as Billie, is passionate and driven, and her portrayal of Billie in the midst of drug withdrawal is heart-rending and effective. Playing the role "full out," Ross deals with the script she has been given, and she richly deserves her Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Female Newcomer in this screen debut. A consortium of scriptwriters, which drew on the frank, but partly fictionalized, autobiography Billie wrote with William Dufty in 1956, has omitted or changed many aspects of her life in order to make the film more unified and dramatic, creating a film that creates even more myths about Billie.

Billy Dee Williams is terrific as Louis McKay, appearing slick and smooth at the beginning, but showing subtle changes of feeling as he is drawn into Billie's orbit and provides some stability for her. The accompanist (Richard Pryor) seems genuinely to care for her, as, it seems, does Reg Hanley (James T. Callahan), though the reasons Harry Bradford (Paul Hampton) has for getting her hooked on drugs is not clear. Read more › Lady Sings the Blues Movie Review (1972) | Roger Ebert Tweet My first reaction when I learned that Diana Ross had been cast to play Billie Holiday was a quick and simple one: I didn't think she could do it. I knew she could sing, although not as well as Billie Holiday and certainly not in the same way, but I couldn't imagine Diana Ross reaching the emotional highs and lows of one of the more extreme public lives of our time. But the movie was financed by Motown, and Diana Ross was Motown's most cherished property, so maybe the casting made some kind of commercial sense. After all, Sal Mineo played Gene Krupa.

Advertisement All of those thoughts were wiped out of my mind within the first three or four minutes of "Lady Sings the Blues", and I was left with a feeling of complete confidence in a dramatic performance. This was one of the great performances of 1972. And there is no building up to it. The opening scene is one of total and unrelieved anguish; Billie Holiday is locked into prison, destitute and nearly friendless, and desperately needing a fix of heroin. The high, lonely shriek which escapes from Ross in this scene is a call from the soul, and we know this isn't any "screen debut" by a Top 40 star; this is acting. It was probably inevitable that the movie itself would follow the tried-and-true formula of most of the musical biographies of the last twenty years. The genre is well-established, and since most of the musicians they've made movies about have had unhappy private lives, there's the problem of making downhill look like uphill, at least sometimes.

This is often handled (and it is again this time) by showing the performer hitting bottom, rebounding into the arms of friends, being nursed back to health, and making a spectacular comeback performance at Carnegie Hall, or at least the Palace. Advertisement The formula is so firmly established that stars even seem to follow it consciously, and we're left with tantalizing possibilities: Did Judy Garland play the Palace for the last time to give the proper form to her biography? You gotta go out in triumph, no matter what happens before. "Lady Sings the Blues" has most of the clichés we expect—but do we really mind clichés in a movie like this? I don't think so. There's the childhood poverty, the searching for love, the unhappy early sexual experiences, the first audition, the big break, the years of climbing to the top, the encounter with hard drugs, the fall, the comeback, the loyal lover … we know the scenes by heart. What brings the movie alive is the performance that Diana Ross and director Sidney J. Furie bring to the scenes. As a gangly adolescent set out to work as a maid in a whorehouse, the diva Ross somehow manages to actually look gangly and adolescent.

When she is transformed into a great beauty later in the film, it is a transformation, because she was brave enough, and good enough, to really look awful at first: "You got a long way to go," the madam tells her accurately, "before anybody gonna pay $2 for an hour of your time." Advertisement The movie is filled with many of the great Billie Holiday songs, and Ross handles them in an interesting way. She doesn't sing in her own style, and she never tries to imitate Holiday, but she sings somehow in the manner of Holiday. There is an uncanny echo, a suggestion, and yet the style is a tribute to Billie Holiday, not an impersonation. The songs do slow the movie down quite a bit, and it feels long at over two hours, but the Billie Holiday music is really the occasion, so I suppose I shouldn't complain. Popular Blog Posts Lady Sings The Blues » Billie Holiday Contact Lady Sings The Blues “Lady Sings the Blues” is a song written by jazz singer Billie Holiday, and jazz pianist Herbie Nichols.

It is the title song to her 1956 album, released on Clef/Verve Records (MGC 721/Verve MV 2047). The song was also chosen to be the title of the 1956 autobiography by Holiday and author William Dufty, and the 1972 movie starring Diana Ross as Holiday. While these autumnal sides bear some of the frayed vocal moments often heard on Holiday’s ’50s Verve sides, the majority here still ranks with her best material. This is especially true of the cuts from the June 1956 date, which produced unparalleled versions of “No Good Man,” “Some Other Spring,” and “Lady Sings the Blues.” See why many fans prefer the “worn out” Holiday heard here to the more chipper singer featured on those classic Columbia records from the ’30s.

– Wikipedia.org & AllMusic Lady Sings the Blues Reviews & Ratings - IMDb IMDb 27 out of 31 people found the following review useful: Ross's Truly Once-in-Her-Lifetime Turn as Lady Day Dominates Overly Customized Biopic from San Francisco, CA, USA 30 December 2005 The recent death of Richard Pryor prompted me to look at the 2005 DVD package of 1972's "Lady Sings the Blues", which proves the then-young comedian to be a fine actor in the meaty supporting role of Piano Man. Even though he was a master stand-up comic, it's still too bad he never pursued roles of a similar dramatic caliber since he obviously had the talent. Similarly, Diana Ross never fulfilled the promise of her big screen debut in the title role as legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday (1915-59). Bearing no physical and little vocal resemblance to Holiday, Ross somehow gets under her true-life character's skin much like Joaquin Phoenix does in "Walk the Line" or Jamie Foxx in "Ray".

Thirty-three years have elapsed since I first saw this movie, and it is with a certain amount of regret that I report that Ross as an actress has not been anywhere near this good since then. Granted she only has three features under her belt, 1975's "Mahogany" reflected an ego run amok, and she was disturbingly miscast in 1978's "The Wiz". From the opening scene where she is suffering through heroin withdrawal in raw, harrowing detail to her sultrier nightclub performances, she manages to be incendiary by her sheer will. She is even convincing in the early scenes where she is barely a teenager. Her vocal performances really don't evoke Holiday's earthier style, though to Ross's credit, her vivid renditions of standards such as "Mean to Me", "Fine and Mellow" and "Gimme a Pigfoot (and a Bottle of Beer)" don't sound like Supremes redux either. This achievement is all the more impressive since director Sidney J. Furie, a journeyman filmmaker at best, has surrounded Ross with an unwieldy rags-to-riches biopic that should have been edited down from its 144-minute running time.

The screenplay - credited to Chris Clark, Suzanne De Passe and Terence McCloy (none of whom wrote a movie script before or since) based in part on Holiday's autobiography - plays fast and loose with the facts and piles on the clichés in true Oscar-baiting fashion. The drug-related scenes are powerful, though they eventually start to feel like condescending plot devices to make the viewer sympathize with Holiday for the persecution she experienced at the hands of abusive men and a bigoted society. Moreover, as Furie discloses on the accompanying audio commentary, the dialogue for several scenes is improvised by the actors, for example, the unnecessarily lengthy Club Manhattan sequence, where the lack of discipline becomes wearing. Contrary to the fact that Holiday's true life story has been well documented and interest in her legacy increased, the filmmakers altered events and people in order to maintain interest from what they thought were mainstream audiences at the time. Consequently, the character of Louis McKay, Holiday's love interest and eventual husband, played with toothsome charm by Billy Dee Williams, synthesizes a lot of men who came into her life and helped shape her career.

The dramatized results leave out key figures of the jazz world like saxophonist Lester Young, trombonist Jimmy Monroe to whom Holiday was married, and record producer John Hammond, as well as Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Artie Shaw and Teddy Wilson--all important colleagues and mentors during the period covered in the film. Instead, we are given Holiday's story as filtered through Ross's own story, an observation confirmed by Ross herself on the accompanying 2005 making-of featurette. When the music is true to the period, it's quite wonderful, but composer Michel Legrand composed some gauzy, anachronistic interludes that sound like symphonic outtakes from his work on "Brian's Song". The costumes also have a Vegas revue feel, no surprise since designer Bob Mackie's flamboyant, early 1970's style is on full display here. For such an overlong movie, the ending feels quite truncated as newspaper clips are used to telegraph her eventual fate as Ross triumphantly sings her signature song, "God Bless the Child", in Carnegie Hall.

Credit Motown mogul and Ross's Svengali, Berry Gordy, for having the fortitude, foresight and tenacity to oversee the project, and the DVD hammers that point in not only the overemphatic, only partially insightful commentary by Furie, Gordy and artists' manager Shelly Berger but also the making-of featurette which features Ross looking strangely youthful and Williams at least looking his age. There are several deleted scenes included in the DVD with no additional commentary from Furie, none refurbished and all understandably excised from the final cut. Was the above review useful to you? 29 out of 38 people found the following review useful: A Slap In Lady Day's Face 6 November 2005 *** This review may contain spoilers *** When this film opened, I was a 17 year old fan of Diana Ross. I thought her fabulous and the film great. Funny how time can change perspective and viewpoint so completely. Shortly thereafter, a local newscast interviewed several musicians who had worked with Billie Holiday and were picketing the theatre where "Lady" had debuted. One said that the film was an insult to her memory, and her true life story was far more tragic than the film had suggested.

More importantly, he said that Billie's music had suffered most in the attempt to film her life. He said that Miss Ross had failed to capture the essence of Billie's music, and that this film had reduced Miss Holiday's standing as the most important Jazz singer who'd ever lived to that of a mediocre pop vocalist. He implored everyone to check out the real Billie Holiday by purchasing some of her records. I had two immediate thoughts. One was, "Hmm, I thought the film was pretty good, but this guy seems to know what he's talking about". The other was, "Billie Holiday made records?" In fact, she made hundreds of records between 1935-59, but in over two hours of screen time, not one of them is even mentioned. Prompted by the musician's suggestion and curiosity, I bought some Billie Holiday records and gave them a listen. That was the start of a life-long love of Jazz, and a complete reassessment of all that I knew and loved about popular music. As for the film, let's start with an early flaw. The opening credits are built around Diana Ross, as Billie Holiday, being arrested and booked for narcotics.

The first thing we see is "New York City  1936" in large letters across the screen; as such, the writers managed to commit a factual error within the first five seconds of the screenplay! Billie was first arrested in 1949, for which she spent one year in jail. In 1936, she was still playing small clubs in Harlem, and it is generally believed that she didn't touch heroin until the early 1940's. The film continues with so many factual mistakes that I could spend all the space allotted here just listing them, but what is most alarming to me today is the disproportionate importance that Louis McKay occupies in this piece of total fiction. McKay was Billie's second or possibly third husband. Her biographers agree that, had she lived, she most certainly would have divorced McKay and removed him from her life completely. He was an opportunist and a user, and was probably abusive.

One of the ironies of her life is that, in a gross miscarriage of justice, McKay not only received the bulk of music royalties that went to her estate, he was allowed as "special consultant" to this film to nourish a portrait of himself that was overly flattering and historically ridiculous. His actual place in her life was merely as one in a long list of men who'd contributed to the misery that was her later life. In the autobiography for which the film was named, Billie describes her first encounter with McKay. She said she found him literally lying in the gutter, and rescued him from a prostitute who was attempting to pick his pocket. Their paths did not cross again until many years later, when he wormed his way back into her life, and took charge of her affairs when she was most vulnerable. In short, he was not the glamorous and gallant figure depicted in the film, nor was she chronically defenseless. Popular legend has it that Billie Holiday once single-handedly beat up two redneck sailors who dared to tangle with her in a Harlem speakeasy - hardly the sniffling crybaby who lay crumpled in a corner waiting for Louis to rescue her, as portrayed in this film.

The film would have you believe that Billie started shooting heroin because she witnessed a lynching; one of the dramatic highpoints depicts Billie on the tour bus reflecting on the horrors of lynching while we hear snatches of her most famous song, Strange Fruit. For years after my first viewing of the movie I wondered why that song didn't have a bigger impact for me the first time I saw it. Now that I have acquired the DVD I know why  Billie's best song has been gutted. We hear the opening lines and the ending, but the middle verses have been eliminated. Gone is the most powerful imagery - "Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. Pastoral scene of the gallant South; the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth then the sudden smell of burning flesh"  these words are simply not there. No wonder I hardly noticed the song when I first saw the film. This picture was made only 13 years after Lady Day's death. How could everybody associated with this film have totally forgotten what she stood for? Billie Holiday literally changed the way popular songs are sung, and therefore influenced every singer that came after her. I do not make this statement lightly.

Many music critics and students agree that, before Billie, popular singers approached songs the same way that classical and opera singers always had; they sang the notes exactly as written, with no deviation from the written melody, no improvisation and, consequently, with little emotion or emphasis on feeling. Billie changed all that  which is why Frank Sinatra (for one) readily admitted that he'd learned everything he knew about phrasing from listening to Billie's records. It is difficult in hindsight to appreciate Billie's impact on vocal style simply because she so totally changed the way songs are sung, and every singer who came after her, whether they realize it or not, has been influenced by her on some level. She made far too important a contribution to music to receive the careless historical rendering and empty dramatics proffered by this film. Was the above review useful to you? 31 out of 45 people found the following review useful: Hopelessly Unhistoric from Oakland, CA 16 March 2002 Diana Ross put in a very fine performance playing a very difficult role. Sadly, that role was not Billie Holiday and this is my big problem with this film.

Any film with a musician as its subject should have loads of that musician's art. Diana Ross does sing some songs, but the MUSIC is not the focus of the film. The unhistoric life of Lady Day is: her experiences as a prostitute, her first gig, getting discovered, touring with a white band, Strange Fruit, etc. They are all thrown together into a hapless hodge-podge lacking continuity or even a semblance of a timeline. An even greater sin is that Lady Day did not develop in a vacuum as this film would have you believe. She was a vital part of the larger jazz scene of the 30s and 40s, a scene she shared on an equal footing with such giants as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Teddy Wilson, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Lester Young, Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster, and most importantly John Hammond, the famous producer and talent scout who discovered Lady Day in a small Harlem club. None of these people appear in the film in any way, shape, or fashion. That's not just ridiculous, it's criminal.

I don't know if there was a permissions problem in portraying them on film (some of them were still alive when the film was made), but their absence is sorely felt. Amadeus is also criticized as unhistoric, which it is, but it made the best of Mozart's life by putting his music at center stage. (It also helps that the events it portrayed were in chronological order.) The same could have maybe rescued LADY SINGS THE BLUES, but the opportunity was missed. Other than Diana Ross's harrowing portrayal of a heroin addicted singer (who could have been anyone but Billie Holiday), there is nothing to recommend this movie. Go watch Ken Burns' JAZZ series instead. Was the above review useful to you? 21 out of 26 people found the following review useful: An amazing (and I do mean amazing) acting debut. End of story. from Los Angeles, California 1 December 1999 Now that I am fortysomething (which amazes even me), I can look back and remember the Supremes final appearance on the Ed Sullivan show...and I can also remember Ed announcing that "Miss Ross is leaving the Supremes to pursue an acting career".

An acting career....who does she think she is? I pondered this question for the longest time, and remained disappointed in Diana Ross until the very first moments of "Lady Sings the Blues", which play like a jazz tune that seems, at first, to make no sense until you as the listener finally tune into the music which actually made sense all along. Diana Ross dosen't so much act the part of Billie Holiday -- she crafts an unforgettable performance that both embodies the spirit of Holiday while also demonstrating the simplest but most complicated acting demands....she simply poses the question, "What if this were my life?". She produces an acting performance that, coupled with the personalized Holiday vocal interpretations, pull the audience into a deeper and deeper sense of completely going on the character's complete life journey -- you completely believe Ross is Holiday because she is so sure of herself -- SHE believes it -- completely. The story follows a typical formula, but the true reason to watch this film is the acting lesson that Ross teaches. Watch this one -- and learn a little something about craft -- from a master instructor, way ahead of her time. Was the above review useful to you?

23 out of 31 people found the following review useful: Ross Totally deserved the Oscar over Liza Minelli from Portland, Oregon 8 April 1999 I would be the first to agree that it was standard fare as far as a musical bio...and Cabaret was a superior film. But Diana Ross' performance was a stunning film debut. This is the kind of overlooked performance that makes it so clear that pure ability is not what the Academy Awards are all about. I tend to think really great acting always sneaks above the voting members scope of being able to truly reccognize great acting. But anyone who hasn't seen Diana Ross' performance in Lady is in for a treat. To think that she went through so many transitions within the film: from youngster, to a drug addict, to a grand singer...it's a truly great performance. Was the above review useful to you? 19 out of 25 people found the following review useful: Seriously flawed from New York City 10 February 2007 Before watching this I knew that it wouldn't be factually correct. I knew that Diana Ross would sing in her own style without trying to imitate the real Billie Holiday.

And I knew that this film was hated & protested by Billie's real life associates and family. I watched it anyway expecting to enjoy it the same way I enjoyed Amadeus even though it stepped all over the real Mozart. I mean, c'mon people, if we want history we should go to a library, not a movie theatre. But with all that said I was still horribly put off by the lack of continuity with the spirit of Billie's life. For one thing, Diana's portrayal made Billie look like a blabbering halfwit. Even in the scenes where she's supposed to be stone cold sober she acts like a flake. If you've ever seen footage of the real Billie, you know that the real Lady was a tough, sharp, smart human being. You don't survive on the streets of New York by being an idiot the way she's shown to be in the film. Next, the performances were shown totally out of context. For example, the song "My Man" is a chilling song about spousal abuse, but in the movie they gloss it up to be a feel-good homage to her guardian angel of a husband Louis McKay.

In real life, Louis was as abusive as all of her husbands (hence the song "My Man"). This is just one example of the many incorrect interpretations this movie presents of Billie's music and her life. OK, but like I said in my 1st paragraph, I can allow the director some poetic license if the movie is worthwhile. Unfortunately this movie didn't deliver. Instead of focusing on the true hardships and trials that plagued Ms. Holiday, we get a whole bunch of clichés about drug use, trying to make it in the business, and how you're supposed to be good to your friends. I'm not sure if this was supposed to be about Billie Holiday or if it was just an ABC afterschool special with clever packaging. The acting was good (if you choose to accept the idea of Billie Holiday being a weak minded flake), and there were several dramatic moments that were well staged. But here's my biggest gripe: the musical score KILLED this movie! It's supposed to be a 1940s jazz biopic, so why are we getting 70s "star search" orchestrations?

You know, like the cheezy swelling violins and pseudo-disco drums when Ed McMahon reads the winner of the competition. Talk about an anachronism, to say nothing of the way it cheapens some otherwise powerful moments. Lastly, I have to say that fans of Billie's music will be pretty annoyed at Diana Ross's versions. They are two totally different singers. Billie sang in a lower register (except when hitting those high notes which she always did clean & clear WITHOUT vibrato) whereas Diana prefers theatrics in the upper register and doesn't go very low at all. This is really a movie for Diana Ross fans or for casual jazz listeners who have never heard of Billie Holiday. Like another reviewer suggested, if you're truly interested in Billie, you should buy some of her records or try to find some old films of her performances. Her music is the best biography you'll ever get. Was the above review useful to you? 7 out of 8 people found the following review useful: The movie was unfortunately not as good as Diana Ross.

from Singapore 27 May 2009 The first question that would run across the mind of anyone who'd watch this movie is: "Can Diana Ross act?" The answer, I'm glad to say, is an unequivocal "Yes." And I think that's what the director wanted to clear up right from the very first scene, with a flash forward to Billie Holiday's drug bust while the credits were still on. Ms. Ross, devoid of make-up and with "crazy hair," put on an extremely convincing performance of heroin (or coke) withdrawal, replete with howling. Her performance is the highlight of the movie, which unfortunately felt like it ran way too long, and I found myself constantly checking the run time. It wasn't bad as a musical. As I had read previously, Ms. Ross didn't seek to imitate Billie Holiday's style, and instead created a distinct and appropriate - yet similar - jazz style of her own just for the movie (check out "Good Morning Heartache"), and I, being a fan, didn't mind the song interludes. What dragged the movie was the constant focus on Holiday's drug addiction (to showcase more of Ms. Ross's acting?).

It felt like there was scene after scene of her being drug-addled, whining, and screaming, which began to abrade after a while. It's too bad, since with better direction and screenplay, coupled with Ms. Ross's capable acting and singing, this could've been one of the truly great musical biopics. Was the above review useful to you? 11 out of 16 people found the following review useful: Ross Fantastic but "Lady" coulda, shoulda... from New York City 20 August 2001 There is no question that no matter how extreme in the past or future Miss. Ross has been or will be (tantrums, bad albums, phoniness, bad publicity, touch me, don't touch me), she will always have this performance to look back on as a moment where everything worked perfectly. The film is imperfect. Flawed. It could have been more realistic, more harrowing, and less hollywood-fied. Had it been, and had Motown not been so intent on proving itself as a major film force, she would have won the Oscar without question. The rumor had always been that in terms of voting it was "this close" as they say.

Even though she did not win, we are still left with a performance of depth, passion and layers that could only be described as magnificent in an experienced actress. In a neophyte, as Miss. Ross was at the time, it is stunning. As a singer, She never before or since has sounded as good. The voice, while not really like Billie Holiday, just glows. Her musicality, intonation and idiomatic phrasing indicated a whole type of music she could have sung had she chosen too. Watch it for her. It will make you think more kindly towards her the next time she, well, acts like Miss. Ross! Was the above review useful to you? 17 out of 30 people found the following review useful: Did I see the same movie? Author: spanky-22 26 March 2001 This was a wonderful star-making vehicle for Diana Ross but the worst thing that could have happened to the legend of Billie Holiday. Billie was big, bold, gutsy and full of life. Diana Ross plays her as a sweet aenimic victim. The look is great and the music, not bad, considering.

But it has zero to do with Billie Holiday and it takes a lot of nerve to try and improve on the original. Was the above review useful to you? 6 out of 9 people found the following review useful: Sex,Drugs and yesterday's love songs 22 March 2006 *** This review may contain spoilers *** Billie Holliday made some lovely records with the Teddy Wilson Orchestra in the 1930s.She made some good records for jazz impresario Norman Granz towards the end of her career,their merit largely due to her accompanying musicians as her voice was shot to pieces by then.What happened in between is the area covered by Sidney Furie's "Lady sings the blues"which uses the title if not much else of her 1958 ghosted autobiography.Like fellow 50s icons James Dean and Marilyn Monroe,Miss Holliday has achieved a post mortem fame far exceeding that she enjoyed whilst she was alive.She is repeatedly presented as a proto-lesbian,proto-bisexual,proto-feminist,proto-strong black woman or whatever label people who think it empowers them to attribute their beliefs to a dead person who is consequently unable to refute them choose to stick on her.

My interest in Miss Holliday is strictly musical.In my opinion she was a considerable artist despite her lifestyle,not because of it. She clearly had some unsuitable male friends,but she wasn't a "victim". If she enjoyed the company of people in "The Life",well,she was all grown up,it was her business and her decision. Playing Miss Holliday in the film,Miss Diana Ross does not try to imitate her,nor does she resemble her in any way.She sings songs associated with her quite competently,and performs rather than acts,as top class singers(Frank Sinatra,Peggy Lee)tended to do.She is clearly a charismatic performer,and that shows on the screen.Unfortunately she does not share Miss Holliday's talent for turning dross into gold,for dross is what "Lady sings the blues" quite evidently is. Sensationalist and exploitative,it concentrates on the subject's sex life and drug addiction,a particularly unpleasant shot of Miss Ross sprawled unconscious over the toilet is my defining image of the film. Clearly Mr Furie was aiming high.

If you want to get a more realistic view of Miss Holliday's life read "Wishing on the Moon" by Donald Clarke.Her early recordings are available (now out of copyright) on a multitude of labels,generally the only difference being the packaging.Listen to the freshness and innocence of "I wished on the moon" and forget that this terrible film was ever made. Was the above review useful to you? Page 1 of 5: Lady Sings the Blues [Original Soundtrack] - Diana Ross | Songs, Reviews, Credits | AllMusic Lady Sings the Blues [Original Soundtrack] AllMusic Rating google+ AllMusic Review by Ron Wynn Her biggest album as a solo act, Diana Ross forever ended any association with the Supremes after this film. She not only got an Oscar nomination and more roles, she really did capture the spirit and flavor, if not the sound and timbre, of Billie Holiday 's music; her performance was the film's only saving grace.

Track Listing Movie Review - - Screen: Billie Holiday:'Lady Sings the Blues' Stars Diana Ross - NYTimes.com Screen: Billie Holiday:'Lady Sings the Blues' Stars Diana Ross By VINCENT CANBY Published: October 19, 1972 "Lady Sings the Blues," the first of what threatens to be a series of so-called entertainments based on the life and hard times of the late, truly great Billie Holiday, poses a tough question: How is it possible for a movie that is otherwise so dreadful to contain such a singularly attractive performance in the title role? It's not as if Diana Ross floats above the film, always remaining somehow disconnected from it, in that superior way that some actors affect when they find themselves in the vicinity of garbage. The former lead singer of the Supremes is on-screen from start to finish, which is to say almost endlessly, but her only apparent limitations are those imposed on her by a screenplay and direction seemingly designed to turn a legitimate legend into a whopper of a cliché. Sidney J.

Furie, the director and the three people credited with the screenplay, cannot use the basic truth of their facts as a defense of the film, although the facts have been generalized to protect the innocent (and the people who wouldn't give releases to the producers). They've made trite and meaningless such things as the child rape, indentured servitude in a Harlem whorehouse and an addiction to drugs that eventually contributed to Lady Day's death at age 44. It all becomes ridiculous. Witness the way they introduce one of Miss Holiday's most successful songs. Time: late 1930's. Place: somewhere in the South, though the terrain looks like Lake Tahoe. Miss Holiday is on a big-band bus tour when she suddenly finds herself witnessing a lynching. She staggers back in terror. On the soundtrack we hear—can it be?—it sounds familiar, but yet—yes, it is! The opening bars of "Strange Fruit!" This Billie Holiday has what might be called a prescient ear.

Under such imbecilic circumstances, it's not yet possible to tell whether Miss Ross is a good actress, but she's an actress of exceptional beauty and wit, who is very much involved in trying to make a bad movie work. Most important, her singing of the more than a dozen songs once sung by Miss Holiday is a talented, very intelligent singer's homage to a jazz style of a sophistication never, since matched by anyone. "Them There Eyes," "What a Little Moonlight Can Do," "Fine and Mellow"—almost all of the great Holiday numbers are there (except, if I remember correctly. "Billie's Blues") and they are about as good as you can get, barring the real things. At times, they may even match the real things, at least some of those numbers Billie recorded late in her career when the phrasing was all that was left of a voice that had once had the kind of purity and assurance that could turn the seedy old Onyx Club on 52d Street into a shoe-box shaped center of the performing arts. "Lady Sings the Blues" opened yesterday at the Loew's State 1 and Loew's Orpheum Theaters.

LADY SINGS THE BLUES, directed by Sidney J. Furie; screenplay by Terence McCloy, Chris Clark and Suzanne de Passe, based on the book by Billie Holiday and William Dufty; director of photography; John Alonzo; edited by Argule Nelson; musical score, Michel Legrand; musical supervisor, Gil Askey; produced by Jay Weston and James s. White; a motown-Weston-Furie production, distributed by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 144 minutes. At Loew's State 1, Broadway at 45th Street, and Loew's Orpheum, 86th Street, near Third Avenue. This film has been classified R. Billie Holiday . . . . . Diana Ross Louis McKay . . . . . Billy Dee Williams Piano Man . . . . .

Richard Pryor Billie Holiday's bio, 'Lady Sings the Blues,' may be full of lies, but it gets at jazz great's core - SFGate MenuSections Billie Holiday's bio, 'Lady Sings the Blues,' may be full of lies, but it gets at jazz great's core Jesse Hamlin, Chronicle Staff Writer Published 4:00 am, Monday, September 18, 2006 Photo: Ho Close Image 1 of 4 Cover of the 50th anniversary edition of "Lady Sings the Blues" by Billie Holiday and William Dufty Cover of the 50th anniversary edition of "Lady Sings the Blues" by Billie Holiday and William Dufty Photo: Ho Image 2 of 4 Ran on: 10-17-2004 Billie Holiday at an April 20, 1939, recording session.

BookReview#BookReview#Chronicle#10-17-2004#ALL#Advance#M3#0422409800 Ran on: 10-17-2004 Billie Holiday at an April 20, 1939, recording session. BookReview#BookReview#Chronicle#10-17-2004#ALL#Advance#M3#0422409800 Photo: Ho Bevan Dufty, Golden Gate Bridge Board of Directors. Ran on: 11-04-2005 Bevan Dufty, Golden Gate Bridge Board of Directors. Ran on: 11-04-2005 Photo: Handout Image 4 of 4 Illustration of Billie Holiday by Ian Johnson / Special to the Chronicle. Ran with story in Datebook on 9/18/06 Illustration of Billie Holiday by Ian Johnson / Special to the Chronicle.

Ran with story in Datebook on 9/18/06 Billie Holiday's bio, 'Lady Sings the Blues,' may be full of lies, but it gets at jazz great's core 1 / 4 Back to Gallery Billie Holiday's autobiography, "Lady Sings the Blues," begins with one of the great all-time leads: "Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen, and I was three." But it's not true. Like other stories in this frank, funny and compelling book, what's on the page doesn't always jibe with the facts dug up by Holiday's biographers. Her parents were never married. When she was born, her mother was 19, her father was 17 and they never lived under the same roof. Yet for all the factual inaccuracies and exaggerations for which the book has been taken to task since its publication 50 years ago, "Lady Sings the Blues" captures the tart voice and unflinching eye of one of the most affecting and mythicized artists of the last century.

The singer tells the story of her bruised life -- a tale of teenage prostitution, racist indignities and abusive men, heroin addiction and heavy drinking, corrupt cops and jail time -- without self-pity. Ghostwritten by the late newspaperman and author William Dufty, the father of San Francisco Supervisor Bevan Dufty , "Lady Sings the Blues" was published three years before Holiday died in a New York hospital at age 44. Police officers were stationed at the door to her room. She was busted for drug possession as she lay dying. It was a ghastly end for a woman whose subtle artistry, with its rhythmic freedom and bare emotion, changed the sound of jazz and pop singing, and continues to seduce and move people who listen to her records. The book, recently republished by Harlem Moon in a 50th anniversary edition, was written when Holiday needed money. As a convicted felon -- she did a year in a Virginia federal prison after a 1947 dope bust in Philadelphia -- the singer was barred from performing in New York clubs where booze was sold.

Dufty, a New York Post writer and editor then married to Holiday's close friend Maely Dufty, wrote the book quickly from a series of conversations with the singer in the Duftys' 93rd Street apartment, drawing on the work of earlier interviewers as well. His aim was to let Holiday tell her story her way. Fact checking wasn't his concern. "Her voice, no matter how the Dufty/Holiday interviewing process went, is as real as rain," wrote the noted ghostwriter David Ritz, who did autobiographies of Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye and many other musicians, in the introduction to the new edition of "Lady Sings the Blues." Despite the factual inaccuracies, "in the mythopoetic sense," Ritz says, Holiday's memoir "is as true and poignant as any tune she ever sang. If her music was autobiographically true, her autobiography is musically true." Bevan Dufty would agree. He's one of the childless singer's two godchildren. The other is another Bay Area resident, singer-lyricist Lorraine Feather, daughter of the late critic Leonard Feather.

Dufty can still summon up the speaking voice of the glamorous lady who clasped him to her breast and sang to him. "Holiday said motherf -- all the time, in her gravelly elegant way," recalled Dufty, sitting in his City Hall office. His mother, a Czech Jewish immigrant who loved jazz, was close to many musicians and even managed the unmanageable Charlie Parker for a spell, learned to curse from Holiday. But with a European accent. "They were pretty funny," said Dufty, 51, who remembers not wanting to go to bed when his parents, Holiday and others would stay up late talking and drinking and singing songs at the piano. Holiday "would try to coax me out from the under the table. She would say, 'sugar, baby, honey,' all these words to entice me to come out. And the way she spoke them is just like her singing. It's like you never heard words spoken like that before." Much of what Dufty knows of Holiday comes from his late mother, who was married to actor Freddie Bartholomew before her brief marriage to William Dufty, one of her seven husbands.

Maely, who took her infant son by train to Philadelphia every day to attend yet another of Holiday's drug trials, was so distraught by the singer's death that she dedicated herself to helping recovering addicts. A number of musicians lived at the Duftys' place while kicking the habit (William and Maely Dufty divorced not long after Holiday's death, and he later married actress Gloria Swanson, who inspired him to write the book "Sugar Blues" about the dangers of processed sugar). Maely Dufty, who was also a writer and editor, spoke out against the exploitation of jazz musicians like Holiday. They not only had to cope with racism -- Holiday, who recounts her ugly Jim Crow experiences in the book, quit Artie Shaw's band in 1938 after being forced to enter Manhattan's Lincoln Hotel through the back door -- but were also under the thumb of the record companies, the nightclub owners and the police. Like others who knew Holiday, the Duftys hated the 1972 film "Lady Sings the Blues," which starred svelte Diana Ross as the tough, buxom Billie Holiday.

Bevan Dufty and his mother saw the picture at the old Varsity Theater in Palo Alto, now a Borders bookstore (where Bevan bought the new edition of the book). His mother was angered by the portrayal of Holiday as weak, and the singer's husband, Louis McKay, played by Billy Dee Williams, as a Good Guy; Maely referred to him in real life as Louis Decay because of what she saw as his corrosive influence. She cursed the screen and walked out. "It's just not who Holiday was," Bevan Dufty said. "She was a very strong person who lived a vibrant, tough life. She never felt sorry for herself." Holiday was born Eleanora Fagan in Philadelphia, where her mother, Sadie, had been sent to give birth to her illegitimate child. Eleanora, a tomboy who grew up on the streets of Baltimore, eventually took the last name of her father, Clarence Holiday, a guitarist who worked with Fletcher Henderson and other bandleaders; she took her first name from her favorite silent screen star, the glamorous Billie Dove.

According to Holiday's book, when her mother moved to New York to find work as a maid, she was left to live with her grandparents in a "poor old little house" with her cousin Ida and Ida's two kids. Ida beat her regularly, she said, and Ida's son Henry taunted her. After he hit her in the face one day with a rat, "I took a baseball bat and put him in the Johns Hopkins Hospital," Holiday recalled (decades later, Maely Dufty refused to go to Johns Hopkins for cancer treatment because of the rotten treatment Holiday got in Baltimore). Holiday scrubbed white people's doorsteps for nickels and ran errands for the prostitutes at Alice Dean's brothel in exchange for being allowed to listen and sing along to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith records on the whorehouse Victrola. The swinging sound and feeling of Armstrong's trumpet and voice made a deep impression on Holiday, an untrained singer with a great ear and a gift for creating melodic lines that floated and danced around the beat in a beguiling new way. After being sexually molested at age 10 by an older man named Mr.

Dick, Holiday said, the abuser went to jail and she was sent to a Catholic home for wayward girls. Years later, after she was famous, she returned to the place where, for some offense, "they put me in a raggedy red dress and locked me up with the body of a dead girl." Her mother brought her to New York in the late '20s and found her a room in an elegant Harlem house owned by Florence Williams. According to Holiday, her mother was unaware that Williams was a madam. "I had a chance to become a strictly twenty-dollar call girl and I took it," wrote Holiday, who spent four months in jail on Welfare Island for prostitution. She began singing in Harlem speakeasies and nightclubs such as Monette's Supper Club, where she was heard by John Hammond, the young Vanderbilt heir who loved black music and became a much-respected talent scout and record producer. Hammond was so taken with Holiday's fresh sound that he brought Benny Goodman to hear her.

Equally impressed, the clarinetist, with whom Holiday had a fling, hired her to sing on his 1933 Columbia record "Your Mother's Son-in-Law." She cut a series of classic small-band records like "What a Little Moonlight Can Do" with pianist Teddy Wilson, trumpeter Roy Eldridge and other top jazzmen. In 1937, she began making a string of great records with Count Basie sidemen like trumpeter Buck Clayton and Lester Young, the poet of the tenor saxophone whose light tone, relaxed swing and romanticism fit hand-in-glove with Holiday's spare style. Young dubbed Holiday "Lady Day" and she gave him his nickname, "Pres," short for president. Masterpieces like "The Man I Love" are unimaginable without his sublime solos. It was Holiday's ability to sing like an instrumentalist, reshaping melodies with unexpected notes, varying her tone colors, stretching and clipping syllables and phrases, that drew musicians to her and made old songs sound new. "I don't think I'm singing.

I feel like I am playing a horn," Holiday said, quoted in the Nat Hentoff-Nat Shapiro book "Hear Me Talkin' to Ya." "I try to improvise like Les Young, Louis Armstrong or someone else I admire. What comes out is what I feel. I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That's all I know." Holiday's career changed direction in 1939 during a long run at Cafe Society, the racially integrated Greenwich Village club frequented by lefty intellectuals. Owner Barney Josephson encouraged Holiday to sing "Strange Fruit," a wrenching song about lynching written by a New York schoolteacher and writer-composer named Abel Meeropol, who wrote under the name Lewis Allan. Holiday sang it with devastating intensity, moving listeners to stunned silence and tears. Some consider the song the first shot in the civil rights movement. It was forever associated with Holiday, who made a popular recording of it for Milt Gabler's Commodore Records (the flip side featured Holiday's classic blues "Fine and Mellow") after Hammond and Columbia refused it.

The song "marked a watershed, praised by some, lamented by others, in Holiday's evolution from exuberant jazz singer to chanteuse of lovelorn pain and loneliness," David Margolick wrote in "Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights," published in 2000. "Once Holiday added it to her repertoire, some of its sadness seemed to cling to her; as she deteriorated physically, the song took on new poignancy and immediacy." Holiday began using hard drugs in the early '40s under the influence of her first husband, Jimmy Monroe, a bon-vivant whose brother, Clark, owned the Harlem nightspot Monroe's Uptown House. As she put it in her book: "I spent the rest of the war years on 52nd Street and a few other streets. I had the white gowns and the white shoes.

And every night they'd bring me the white gardenias and the white junk." She made some of her most beautiful records for Decca during that period, doing torch songs like "Lover Man," "No More, and "Don't Explain," co-written by Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr., with whom she wrote "God Bless the Child." Gabler produced most of these orchestral records. After her Decca contract ended, she signed with Norman Granz's Verve Records, for which she recorded throughout the '50s. Her voice was weaker and frayed from hard living, and her work was uneven. But her late-period interpretations were often richer, the feeling even deeper. Lorraine Feather, Holiday's other godchild, who lives on the San Mateo coast, leans toward the lighter-than-air stuff of Holiday's early years but likes music from the later periods, too. She wishes people didn't think of Holiday only "as a messenger of misery," as her father once put it. Leonard Feather and his wife Jane named their only child after Holiday.

But Lorraine thought Billie sounded like a boy's name -- Billie Feather would be a good name for an exotic dancer, she said with a laugh -- and in grade school asked people to call her Lorraine, one of her middle names. "I have a photograph that I treasure, that is so different from the Billie Holiday most people think of," said Feather, who remembers but no longer has the pair of pink booties Holiday knitted for her when she was born. "She's on skis in Switzerland. It was taken when my dad arranged for her to go to Europe on the Jazz Club USA tour (in 1954). She's smiling in the snow. It's adorable. One year, after my dad was gone, my mom and I sent out a Christmas card with the picture on it. It said 'Holiday Greetings.' " Bevan Dufty has some pleasing pictures of Holiday, too, as well as a disturbing shot of a disheveled Holiday, sitting on a couch in a robe, holding a cigarette. There's a can of Miller High Life on the table and needle tracks on Holiday's arm. "It's really rough here," Dufty said, gazing at the picture.

He listens to a lot of Holiday's music, but the album he probably plays most is the exquisite and heart-breaking "Lady in Satin," recorded for Columbia with the Ray Ellis Orchestra the year before Holiday died. It really gets to him. "It feels like it comes from heaven," Dufty said. "I feel like she's singing it now, up in heaven somewhere." Recording picks Recordings from all phases of Billie Holiday's career have been widely reissued on CD, from single and double-disc "best of" collections to 10-CD box sets packed with alternate takes, photos and essays. Here are a few suggestions: "Lady Day: The Best of Billie Holiday," Legacy. A two-CD set containing many of the classic sides Holiday cut for Columbia and its Brunswick, Vocalion and Okeh labels in the 1930s and early '40s, including "What a Little Moonlight Can Do," "A Fine Romance," "You Go to My Head" and "The Man I Love." "Billie Holiday: The Complete Decca Recordings," GRP.

An excellent two-CD box featuring the torch songs, raucous renditions of signature Bessie Smith numbers and other material Holiday recorded for Decca from 1944-50. "Lady in Autumn: The Best of the Verve Years," Verve. A good two-disc survey of Holiday's small-band recordings of the 1950s, featuring stellar soloists like Ben Webster and Benny Carter. "Lady in Satin," Legacy. A heartbreaking beauty. Writer Michael Brooks wrote that this 1958 album feels "as if a group of family and friends are gathered around a loved one and saying their last goodbyes." "Ken Burns Jazz -- Definitive Billie Holiday," Verve. Compiled by the documentary filmmaker, this single disc collection culls material from the three major phases of the singer's career. To hear samples of Holiday's music, go to and and search for her by name. Latest from the SFGATE homepage: Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page.

Question: Which singer was played by Diana Ross in the 1972 film 'Lady Sings The Blues'?
Answer: BILLIE HOLLIDAY