‘I had to stop therapy. I needed the pain’: Fantasia Barrino on trauma, triumph and filming The Color Purple

Barrino entered American Idol in 2004 as a young single mother who struggled to read, and won over the nation with her powerhouse voice and personality. Now she is starring in her first film. She discusses poverty, violence, Oprah – and gratitude

‘Iwasn’t going to show my face,” Fantasia Barrino says, speaking on a video call from Los Angeles. “But I was like: ‘How rude. I can see her pretty face.” Born and raised in High Point, a small city in North Carolina, Barrino, 39, is famous in the US as the teenage single mother who won American Idol 20 years ago.

Now, she is going global, playing Celie in the new musical screen adaptation of The Color Purple, produced by Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey.

A star could go any which way with that kind of rags-to-riches story, but you would expect at least a little showbiz haughtiness. I have never met a warmer person in my life. “I’m a Cancer, so I believe in loving and hugging and taking care of everybody,” she says later.

It is hard to think of a story that more encourages compassion than The Color Purple. Alice Walker’s prize-winning epic novel, published in 1982, is the story of downtrodden women surviving the first half of the 20th century in rural Georgia.

It starts with rape, incest and teenage pregnancy and moves through loss, estrangement, domestic violence and the brutality of a racist state. It is the last thing you might imagine setting to music, except that the way it resolves – complicated, painful, unvarnished, harmonious – is musical.

It feels more recent, more live, now than it did when it was published, partly because so many people then were pretending that racism was a historical relic. Barrino did a Q&A about the film recently with Winfrey, who asked which one word the cast would use to describe it. “I said: ‘Healing.’ She’s, like: ‘Wait a minute.’ But, yeah, we were being healed. I was healed. I had just started therapy when we started shooting and I had to stop it. I needed the pain – and Celie healed me.”

Fantasia Barrino and Taraji P Henson in The Color Purple. Photograph: Eli Adé/Warner Bros

This is not the first time Barrino has played Celie. At 23, she was on Broadway. “That was my first time ever seeing a Broadway show,” she remembers. “They took me to eat, said: ‘We want you to be Celie,’ and I’m thinking: ‘Are you crazy? Are you drunk? Is something wrong?’”

It wasn’t easy. She had left school at 14 and had no training. “At that time in my life, I didn’t know how to come out of character,” she says. “I took Celie home with me; I woke up with Celie. I cried all the time. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go back to that.

But I’m so glad that I didn’t allow fear to hinder me from who Celie is now. Brilliant, strong, wise, smart, beautiful; all the things that I did not get to see, playing her at the age of 23. I’ve got to see her in a different way, probably because of where I am in life – the woman I’ve become.”

That woman is a mother of three, with “a bonus son” and two grandchildren through her husband, the entrepreneur Kendall Taylor.

The musical has not been without controversy. Cast members have complained that normal set standards weren’t observed: they weren’t catered for, they didn’t have transport and their pay was low.

The implication is that the film, made almost entirely by people of colour, was done on a shoestring, underpinned by racism. The person who has taken most of the flak for this is Winfrey, rather than Spielberg.

Barrino is careful not to pick sides: “That wasn’t my experience. But this was my first movie. I was so excited to be around all these great actors. I’m such a southern woman; I’ve seen a lot and I’ve been through a lot.

Everything in life is not going to come peaches and cream. And Oprah never left – she was right in the back with us. I’ll say we really had a great time and I ate good. I gained a lot of weight.”

Fantasia Barrino winning American Idol in 2004. Photograph: Ray Mickshaw/Fox TV/Fremantle Media North America/Kobal/Shutterstock

In the 1985 movie of the book, Whoopi Goldberg took the role of Celie. Barrino’s mother wouldn’t let her watch it when she was little, because it was too heavy, but she managed to see it anyway.

“It was the first time I felt like I had seen me; it was the first time I had heard certain stories be told.” Did she feel pressure to match up to the original performance? “No. [Goldberg] laid down the work so beautifully – it can’t be touched.”

It is customary to mention how a gospel church upbringing shapes someone’s singing voice, but rarer to say how much it elevates spoken cadence. Barrino speaks with the kind of poetic brevity you might use to declare independence.

I ask her how she got together with Taylor, whom she married in 2015. “We married after three weeks,” she says. “We married before we’d even laid with each other. Here’s how I knew he was the one … Are you ready for this?”

Sure, but only once we have filled in the backstory.

Barrino was born into an intensely musical family: her uncles were the Barrino Brothers, a 70s R&B band; her cousins are K-Ci and JoJo, also an R&B duo. They were industrious, but not rich – she remembers eating grits (a kind of maize porridge) every day for a week, practising by candlelight because the lights had gone off – and she missed a lot of school.

Her grandmother had had her first child at 17 and felt it snuffed out her dreams of musical success; the same thing happened to her mother, to whom Barrino is very close. “Singing was everything in our home, right?

The joy that music brought us, it was like a drug. You know, I didn’t come from a rich family. But I did have two parents who made sure we had. Me and my brothers laugh now because, like, those was good days – candles lit.”

Even in a family where singing was the norm, even at five years old, her voice was extraordinary. Her father, with whom she has a complicated relationship – “It is the best that it can be, right now” – had a lot, possibly everything, riding on musical success. “Sometimes people can be rooting for you for personal reasons,” she says.

When she was 14, she was raped at school and dropped out. She talks about that, and subsequent violence, in the broadest terms – doesn’t want to hide anything, doesn’t want to dwell. “My grandmother used to say they would try to beat the light out of you.

I was in a lot of abusive relationships, but then it goes back to: I didn’t love myself at the time.” At 16, she got pregnant; she had her daughter, Zion, at 17. This could have been the end of her ambition, were it not for American Idol.

If you listen to Barrino’s first few auditions, the power of her voice is extraordinary: it sounds accomplished, mature, commanding. It simply doesn’t compute that she is only 19, has a two-year-old and no money and had to memorise the lyrics of Summertime because she wasn’t confident that she could read them in the moment.

She sounds as powerful as an all-time great, but never as if she is doing an impression. “I can hear,” she says. “We call it a grit: the pain, the truth, the honesty. Since I was a little girl, playing Aretha Franklin over and over again, I could hear the honesty in a voice and I was attracted to it.”

Just before her performance of Summertime, well-meaning members of the American Idol production team had taken her aside. She had been getting flak online. “And they said: ‘Listen, you may want to not talk so much about being a young mom, your school situation.’

I went in the bathroom and I cried like a baby. I thought: ‘Either I’m going to change who I am, which is going to feel so weird, or I’m going to stand and show them that.’”

When it came to it, 65 million people voted for who she was. Simon Cowell makes a surprise hero appearance in this story: he called Barrino the best contestant who had ever appeared on the show (this was 2004, but there had still been a ton of them). Zion, of course, was too young to appreciate what was going on. Later, when Barrino had “a matte lipstick line, I had some jeans that my name was on, she finally reached a point in her life where she knew: ‘OK, she’s a celebrity.’ But she also wanted me home more.”

Barrino with Oprah Winfrey, who produced the film. Photograph: Erik Pendzich/Shutterstock

Two years after American Idol, Barrino wrote an autobiography, Life Is Not a Fairytale, which was adapted as a TV film, in which she starred. As monumental as her singing voice was, her speaking voice was still shy and high, as if she were scared of being told off.

She got the Color Purple role on Broadway a year later. It was swings and roundabouts: a lot of daunting situations, a lot of crying and, more consequentially, a naivety about the industry that led to Barrino almost losing her home in 2009.

“That’s why I’m so in love with the book of Job,” she says. “Because even when God started messing him again, he never took his eyes off God.”

She won a Grammy in 2011 and by 2014 was back on Broadway with After Midnight, which is where the love story with Taylor began. “I did a seven-month fast, just not dating anyone, dating myself.

How can I let somebody else love me when I don’t love myself? I put a ring on my own finger, I fasted from television; the only music I would listen to was jazz. The funny part is, when I was fasting, everybody wanted to date me.”

This was when she made her list – intended for God, but helpfully written out on index cards – of what she was looking for in a man: “There will be no lusting, there will be no guy who says: ‘You so fine.’ I needed someone to spark me in a different way. Everything happens for a reason, and the reason here was me meeting my husband and him having bookshelves everywhere, reading all day.”

It really crops up a lot, the literacy – how she mastered it, how much shame was heaped upon her when she dared to be insecure about it in public. Her education was a straight trade, as she describes it, with her father: “A smart, wise man, thinking: ‘We can get out of this situation if we just get one hit single, if we get one record label to recognise us.’ And so that’s all we were focused on. It made me a very lax, lazy reader. It’s crazy that I marry a man who all he does is reads.”

Her father sued her for $10m after her autobiography was published. She didn’t even say anything that bad, just that he had put music before her education.

That said, when she is described as the embodiment of the American dream, it’s complicated: for sure, she overcame violence and poverty in her early life with pluck and endeavour. But if you have to be this talented to beat those odds, that is not a collective dream; it’s a fantasy.

Barrino interprets the dream differently, anyway, as a question of whether or not you can ever be satisfied: “I have decided to be content with where I am and what I have. If I don’t ever do another movie, I’ve done this one and I did it to the best of my ability. If I will never get another award, I don’t need one, because I woke up this morning and somebody didn’t wake up. This is a blessing that you and I got – be grateful.”

 This article was amended on 18 January 2024. The Color Purple is not yet showing in UK cinemas, as an earlier version said, but will be released on 26 January.