Spotlight on South African actress

Leleti Khumalo

Leleti Khumalo 

FILMOGRAPHY

HOTEL RWANDA (2004)
YESTERDAY (2004)
CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY (1995)
SARAFINA! (1992)
VOICES OF SARAFINA (documentary about Broadway play, 1989)

Born in Durban, South Africa, 1970

Leleti's movie, Yesterday, has been nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film
It's about time her work was recognized by the Academy.

"I hope this will open many doors for my career. I'm just crossing my fingers. I'm in the movie industry and I hope to go far ... I'd love to go and work there (Hollywood) with the big fish," she told Reuters

You go, girl!!! :)

To learn more about Yesterday, check below.

LELETI KHUMALO was born in 1970 at Kwa Mashu Township in the North of Durban. Growing up in the poverty of township life, she was initiated into a youth backyard dance group called Amajika mentored by Tu Nokwe.

In 1985, she auditioned for Mbongeni Ngema's upcoming new musical, which was to became the international blockbuster Sarafina! Ngema wrote the lead character of Sarafina for her.

Leleti enchanted audiences in South Africa and on Broadway, where she was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actress. Sarafina! stayed for two years on Broadway before embarking on a worldwide tour. In 1987 she received an NAACP Image Award for Best Stage Actress.

In 1991, together with Whoopi Goldberg, Khumalo starred in Darrell James Roodt's film version of Sarafina! which was distributed worldwide, and became the biggest film production to be released in the African continent. Again she was nominated for the film Image Award together with Angela Bassett, Whoopi Goldberg and Janet Jackson.

In 1993, Khumalo released her first album, Leleti and the Sarafina, and co-starred in Ngema's international hit musical Magic at 4 AM which was dedicated to the legend of Muhammed Ali. She then starred in Ngema's musical Mama (1996), which toured Europe and Australia. In 1997, she also starred in Ngema's Sarafina 2.

Khumalo moved into dramatic acting when she starred in the play Koze Kuse, written by Selo Make Kancube. She then played a role in Darrell James Roodt's film Cry, the Beloved Country (1995) of Alan Paton's novel, produced by Anant Singh and starring Richard Harris and James Earl Jones. She was also featured on the TV series The African Skies, and appeared in a number of TV commercials.

Leleti next had another success on stage with The Zulu (1999) written and directed by Mbongeni Ngema, about King Cetshwayo and the Battle of Isandlwane in the Anglo Zulu War. In 2000 she was awarded an acting diploma by the Mbongeni Ngema Academy of Performance Excellence. Khumalo next starred in 2003 at the musical extravaganza Stimela Sase Zola at the African Bank Market Theatre in Johannesburg in 2003.

This year, in addition to her role in Yesterday, Khumalo will be featured in the film Hotel Rwanda, with Don Cheadle and Nick Nolte. She is also preparing to release a dance album.

Thursday July 22, 2004

Yesterday’s plight

A simple but no less moving tale of a woman’s struggle against AIDS, Yesterday tells the brutal irony of hope and despair in the face of tragedy, writes FOO YEE PING.

Her name is Yesterday because her father felt that things were better yesterday than today.

Too bleak for your liking? But that's reality for the young mother who discovered that she had HIV.  

Billed as the first international film in the Zulu language with English subtitles, Yesterday was shown in a special screening last Wednesday in Bangkok in conjunction with the 15th International AIDS Conference.

Despite the tagline that "love has the power to change our tomorrows," you wish that yesterday will come once again for the protagonist who has seen beauty in those bygone days before the infection.

But thankfully, director Darrell James Roodt went easy on the melodrama and Yesterday, played by Leleti Khumalo (of Sarafina! fame) portrayed a simple, courageous woman without self-pity.  

The movie, shot in South Africa, tells of Yesterday's twice failed attempts to see a doctor for her persistent cough despite having to walk two hours from her remote village of Rooihoek to the clinic. There is always a long queue but there are only so many patients that the doctor could attend to.

Finally, a kind village teacher paid for a taxi so that Yesterday could reach the clinic early and be among the first to see the doctor.

This, ironically, is the start of an even longer bitter journey for Yesterday as she discovers her condition, her husband's brutal response, the stigma, and eventual widowhood when her husband dies of AIDS.

Other than the friendship of the village teacher, Yesterday's source of strength is her young daughter Beauty.

When the doctor commented one day about Yesterday's remarkable well-being, she replied: "Until my daughter goes to school, I will not die."

This is a contrast to the first time when she finds out about her infection. Then, she had asked the doctor sadly: "Am I going to stop living?"

The movie is also about forgiveness. Yesterday stays by her husband's bedside throughout his final days despite what he has done to her.

At his deathbed, the man calls out for Beauty. "It's Yesterday," his wife replies. That perhaps is one of the most poignant moments in the movie.

The movie doesn't preach. Neither does it speak of the good old days. It is just a simple story of a young mother's triumph in her losing battle against AIDS.

During a press conference after the movie screening, Khumalo explained that "in Zulu culture, we forgive a lot."

"Yesterday was mostly alone in the village. Maybe she even had to bury her husband herself as the villagers didn't want to have anything to do with him," she said.

The actress, in an interview published by South Africa's Sunday Times on June 6, remarked that this was the first time she had acted in Zulu and she loved the experience.

"The fact that it was shot in KwaZulu-Natal, my home, made it easy and exciting for me."

Khumalo, 34, also reportedly said that she had much in common with her character.

"She is a woman married into a rural family with many challenges. I am married into a traditional family so I know some of her challenges," said the South African actress who played Sarafina in the musical and in which she was nominated for a Tony award for best actress in recognition of her Broadway effort.

The lovely actress will soon be seen in Hotel Rwanda with Nick Nolte.

Roodt, when asked during the press conference why Beauty was not tested for HIV in the movie, explained that he did not want to over elaborate on anything. Neither did he want the movie to dwell on how Khumalo's husband, a miner who works far away from home, was infected in the first place.

"It's not a documentary. I try to avoid as much sentimentality as possible. We kept it simple, besides showing how lonely Yesterday is, and her desolation," he said of the movie that was shot within a month last October in central Eastern South Africa.

However, one criticism which surfaced about the movie on the Internet is that the film, ironically, perpetuates social stigma when it showed scenes of villagers wanting to get rid of the sick couple.

Yesterday is supported by the Nelson Mandela Foundation as part of an HIV/AIDS awareness campaign.

Producer Anant Singh, who was present in Bangkok, said the film will be released in South Africa on Aug 20.

"We are also planning for theatrical release in the United States," he said, adding that the Bangkok screening was the first time outside of South Africa after its outing at the 25th Durban International Film Festival last month.

Anant and Roodt have worked on several anti-apartheid films like Sarafina! (starring Whoopi Goldberg, 1992) and Cry, the Beloved Country (starring James Earl Jones, 1995).

The producer's next project is Long Walk to Freedom with Morgan Freeman.

HBO plans to release Yesterday in the cinemas and later on HBO. No dates have been fixed.

Fri. Sep. 17, 2004

Her Zulu film has HIV message

It's a long way from Sarafina, the famed South African musical, to Yesterday, a small but powerful movie about how AIDS brings tragedy and social ostracism to a woman living in a rural Zululand village.

Sarafina brought Leleti Khumalo international attention and a Tony nomination on Broadway for her performance in the title role. Yesterday, directed by Darrell James Roodt and co-produced by HBO Films, is likely to deepen respect for her dramatic talents.

Sarafina came out of the resistance to apartheid and a struggle that ended with freedom for the black South African majority. Yesterday is about an ongoing struggle against a disease that is said to kill 600 South Africans every day.

"My father named me Yesterday," her character says, "because everything was better yesterday." A persistent cough causes Yesterday to make the long walk to join the line-up at the nearest clinic. On her third weekly visit she is finally seen by the woman doctor and diagnosed as HIV-positive. When her husband, who at first strikes her and denies his own condition, comes home to die from AIDS, the village shuns Yesterday and her daughter. She builds a shack outside the village and tends to her husband until his death. In rapid decline herself, Yesterday vows to stay alive until her daughter is in school.

"I hope it can be an eye-opener about (the effects of HIV), especially on women," says Khumalo, 34. "It was important to me to make it." The fact that the movie is the first to be made in Zulu for wide release also made it an important project for her.

Khumalo grew up in a township north of Durban and now lives in Johannesburg, where she is married to Mbongeni Ngema, producer of Sarafina and a native of rural KwaZulu-Natal. She got her training as a performer, she says, in the least formal of ways. "It was in somebody's garage in the township."

Ngema came to see her youth group one day. "He said, `Do you want to do a play?' and that's how it started."

After stage work, she was cast by Roodt in Cry The Beloved Country, a widely released film that starred Richard Harris and James Earl Jones.

Of her latest film, she says, "This is a simple movie; it's like someone telling you about their life." Without being preachy, Yesterday bears a message, she says. "This movie is very important for people in the rural areas, because it's going to give them information about how to deal with HIV and AIDS. At the moment all they know is that it's going to take that person away from them."

Yesterday will go on a travelling cinema circuit to reach rural African audiences.

Meeting the people who go to see her film is the most gratifying aspect of the Toronto festival for Khumalo.

"The festival audiences have been amazing. I didn't think it would be appreciated that much, especially because it's done in Zulu."

Sarafina! star Leleti Khumalo lived the story
USA Today; Arlington, Va.; Oct 2, 1992; Susan Spillman;

LOS ANGELES - Twenty-one-year-old Leleti Khumalo has a lot in common with the title character she plays in the political movie musical Sarafina!

Both grew up poor in a violent South African township idolizing Nelson Mandela and fantasizing about becoming a movie star.

The similarities are more than coincidence, though. Mbongeni Ngema, to whom Khumalo is now married and lives with in Johannesburg, wrote the original play with her in mind. He spotted Khumalo at a backyard dance class in Durban, South Africa, when she was 13. "She was attractive ... and she had so much focus," he recalls.

But Khumalo had little idea she'd made such an impression until three years later, when Ngema returned to Durban and announced that he wanted her to star in his new play about a teacher in South Africa who awakens the pride and political consciousness of one of her young students.

Khumalo spent two years with the show on Broadway, followed by two years with the U.S. touring company. And now she's in the movie, which co-stars Whoopi Goldberg as the teacher.

Working with Goldberg, whom Khumalo idolized, was nerve-wracking, she says. "I remember doing the first scene with Whoopi; I was sweating and shaking."

Still, she preferred making the movie to performing on stage. "For a person like me who is shy, (stage work) was hard. Every day I was nervous." But touring the USA was an "exciting experience."

However, she was surprised to find racism here. While working on Broadway in New York, Khumalo recalls, "I was trying to stop a cab but the cab driver passed us then stopped for a white person. I was very surprised because when we came here we heard that America is a free country."

Growing up poor in Durban, Khumalo never expected to become an actress. Her father died when she was 3, her mother worked as a domestic and the family of four kids lived in a home with no furniture except for one bed.

"We were poor. And I knew that if you want to be an actress you have to go to school first and you have to have money to go to school," she says. "I'm lucky."

Ngema, who taught Khumalo to act and sing, counters: "She's a born talent."

Khumalo is working on a dance album. Next she'll star in the screen version of Ngema's play Township Fever, a love story set against South African violence.

"I hope to be a big star," she says. "I'd like to do movie after movie after movie."

But she won't relocate to the USA. "I want to come here to work and then go back home."

Despite African National Congress leader Mandela's release from prison, Khumalo says South Africa is more confused and as volitile as ever. Her brother was shot in the leg just two months ago. Still, she doesn't want to leave.

"It's a beautiful country," she says.

As for the political climate: "I have hope," she says. "I always have hope that it will change. You have to."