Gayle King surprises Angela Bassett with her ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It’ dress
Two-time Oscar nominee Angela Bassett was surprised with a blast from her movies past when she was presented with her iconic costume from the 1993 biopic “What’s Love Got to Do With It.”
Yes, “CBS Mornings” host Gayle King did the thing.
Bassett’s role as legendary singer Tina Turner earned the “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” star her first Academy Award nomination and King had a special surprise in store for the actor during Friday’s show.
Bassett, 64, who is nominated as a supporting actress at this year’s Oscars, gleefully did her Turner dance with the fringed gold dress she wore in the musical film and said she hadn’t seen it in 30 years.
“Oh, look at this,” Bassett exclaimed when she saw the costume, which was accompanied by the matching pumps she wore in the film.
“Angela, this is the actual dress,” King told her, with both women noting that it was the costume Bassett wore during the scene with the performance of Ike and Tina Turner’s rollicking version of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary.”
King said that the beaded dress and its matching embellished shoes were among the few items from the film that were preserved in the archives. They were stored in a climate controlled warehouse on the Walt Disney lot, according to the Wrap.
The “Waiting to Exhale” and “American Horror Story” star appeared to be in disbelief that the shoes she danced in during “What’s Love Got to Do With It” were in front of her and said that she hadn’t seen the costumes since the last day of shooting the Brian Gibson-directed film, which chronicled the tumultuous love affair between Ike and Tina Turner.
“I love it. I love it!” the star exclaimed. “Can I take it home? I’ll keep it safe.”
“We would do take, and take, and take. We did that song all day,” Bassett told King. “We’d do it from the top of the song to the end of the song, completely through, not like bits and pieces. The entire thing, me and the girls, the Ikettes, and afterwards [it felt] as if you swallowed a wool sweater. And he would say ‘Go again,’ and you were like, ‘Can an actor have a moment, a minute?’”
Alas, Bassett did not win the Academy Award at that 1994 ceremony. The lead actress Oscar went to Holly Hunter for her role in Jane Campion’s period romance “The Piano.” Many, including King, said Bassett “was robbed” of the accolade that night and the CBS host asked her how she felt about it all these years later.
“Of course, in the moment you’re hoping, and praying, and wishing, but I never, I don’t walk away thinking ‘I’ve been robbed.’ That’s too negative of an emotion to carry with me for the rest of my life,” Bassett said. “I choose to believe that there’s a reason why it didn’t happen.”
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Bassett went on to star in Kathryn Bigelow’s cop drama “Strange Days” with Ralph Fiennes, Wes Craven’s “Vampire in Brooklyn” with Eddie Murphy and the groundbreaking ensemble drama “Waiting to Exhale” — a film that preceded but embodied the term “Black girl magic,” King told her.
Bassett described the Forest Whitaker-directed adaptation of Terry McMillan’s popular novel as a “beautiful, serious, funny, poignant story.”
“We hadn’t seen those characters and those stories and all those women together at the same moment in time, because it was as if women and Black women couldn’t carry a story, and we proved that we could,” she said.
Bassett broke ground again this year as the first actor to be recognized by the motion picture academy for a performance in a Marvel Cinematic Universe project, playing the grieving mother Queen Ramonda in the Ryan Coogler film.
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