On Feb. 12th, The Hollywood Reporter’s Rebecca Keegan wrote a feature article on Lee Daniels’ newfound sobriety and success.
In the article, “Lee Daniels on Creating Without the “Blanket” of Drugs and Alcohol”, Keegan interviewed me about our unique relationship.
I want to encourage others in the Entertainment Industry that you too, can either see the difficulty or the opportunities. I hope you choose the opportunities.
Daniels, whose father was a police officer killed on the job when he was 15, moved to L.A. in the early 1980s and founded a nursing company that specialized in HIV and AIDS patients. He sold that company and started working in casting and managing — an early job was as a casting assistant on Purple Rain. As he was making that career transition in the early ’80s, Daniels met Cynthia Robinson Oredugba, who had been the first Black female agent at William Morris, at a party and she began advising him. “He had a vision,” Oredugba says. “He had direction. For an African American man at that time, you could see the difficulty or you could see the opportunities. And he saw the opportunities.”