Like Venus Fading

A great rollercoaster rags-to-riches-to-rags tale about the first black Hollywood 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… 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…