Like Venus Fading - Rilegato

A great rollercoaster rags-to-riches-to-rags tale of Hollywood’s first black sex goddess.

· Like Elvis, like Marilyn, the first black film superstar didn’t die tragically, but lives among us still, changed out of all recognition...
· This is the story of the tragic rise and redemptive fall of Hollywood’s first black sex symbol
· Propelled out of Depression-era poverty by the ambition of her mother and her own talents, young Irene O’Brien finds she attracts attention easily – both welcome (she is talent-spotted from Mississippi to Harlem to Hollywood) and unwelcome (at six, a fat, over-friendly storekeeper gets altogether too excited when she sits on his lap...)
· She blazes a trail no other black performer has taken before and becomes an international sex symbol in the 1950s – ‘the black Monroe’
· Fame and fortune come running: she is the first black woman to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress
· But happiness eludes her: her celebrity marriage never works; her daughter is autistic; and the studios soon tire of her as she ages
· Her descent into drunkenness and derangement ends with her very mysterious ‘death’ in the mid-1960s at the age of forty-three. But, beaten but not bowed, Venus Johnson rises from the ashes of Irene O’Brien to tell her tale and live out her days in tranquillity...