Deadline reports that a TV biopic is in the works based on Kitty Kelley’s best-selling Oprah, the unauthorized biography of talk-show queen Oprah Winfrey that rocked the world with revelations like the fact that a super rich celebrity spends a lot of money on things and that, while she may have grown up poor, she may not have grown up quite as poor as she’s suggested. While Winfrey herself has denounced the book as a “so-called biography” for its mildly scandalous and mostly unsubstantiated assertions, producer Larry A. Thompson—who recently hit TV movie paydirt with the highly rated for some reason Amish Grace—sees it as a “cinematic portrait of [a] powerful and beloved icon,” which is nice and sycophantic and everything, but there’s still no way Thompson will ever get to produce anything for OWN TV. At the moment, Thompson is searching for the perfect someone to play Winfrey, saying he recently decided on casting an unknown because “if you have an actress people know, it may make it more difficult to get into the character as the face may block the icon,” and also because no known actress would come within a mile of this project, lest she find herself bullied into industry oblivion by Oprah’s shadowy, lavender-scented cabal.
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