Jennifer Hudson has made a name for herself by picking herself up following bitter disappointment. In 2004 she was voted off American Idol, the US talent contest, in an ignominious seventh place but re-emerged two years later in a starring role in Dreamgirls for which she won an Oscar.
On Sunday she made a second comeback that was far more poignant and even more powerful. She took to the stage of the Super Bowl XLIII in Tampa, Florida and delivered a version of the national anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner that had the critics reaching for the superlatives.
The back story will have been widely known among the almost 100 million viewers expected to have tuned in for the climax of the American football season. On October 24 last year her mother, Darnell Hudson Donerson, her brother Jason and seven-year-old nephew Julian were murdered in Chicago, her hometown.
The estranged husband of Hudson's sister has been charged with first-degree murder and is due in court later this month. Hudson has not been seen in public since the tragedy struck, and she could not have chosen a more testing and high-profile occasion to reappear. The Super Bowl is America's sporting and televisual moment combined - last year it was watched by a record 97.5 million viewers.
The pressure was clear. Hudson sighed audibly at the start and end of her performance. But she delivered a Force Nine rendition of theanthem's first verse that was greeted with almost universal delight.
Her local paper, the Chicago Tribune, said when she sang the final"home of the brave" it was like a "howitzer into the heavens". Others said her performance ranked on a par with that of Whitney Houston at the 1991 Super Bowl - another highly poignant moment though on that occasion for national rather than personal reasons: America was on the verge of a full-scale invasion of Iraq in the first Gulf war.
Hudson's public convalescence will now gather pace. Next Sunday she sings at the Grammy Awards, and she has begun filming a video for her song If This Isn't Love.
0 comments:
Post a Comment