FREE screening presented by the Uptown Waterloo Jazz Festival
“Based on Billie Holiday's autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues begins in the early 1930s in Baltimore, where the teenaged Billie (Diana Ross) is raped and then sent to New York to stay with a friend of her mother's. In Harlem she works first as a maid, and later in a brothel. With the encouragement of the brothel's piano man (Richard Pryor), she begins singing professionally and eventually becomes the lover of gambler Louis McKay (Billy Dee Williams)--actually Holiday's third husband but the sole romantic interest in the film.
“Holiday’s inimitable style begins to win her notice on the club circuit, and she is invited to tour the South with a band led by white musicians. On tour she's devastated by racist treatment and turns to drugs, a habit which threatens both her professional and personal success. Things get worse when her mother dies, and Holiday enters a sanitarium in an attempt to get clean. Although she later begins a new life with McKay, her triumph is short-lived, and the film closes by glancing over her remaining, troubled days until her death at age 44.” - TV Guide
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