LOS ANGELES, Nov 17: Oprah Winfrey said "The Color Purple" helped her cope with the trauma of being raped as a young girl, as she introduced a new film based on Alice Walker's acclaimed novel Thursday.
The movie -- a musical -- is the second big-screen adaptation, after Steven Spielberg's 1985 drama, and again portrays the hardships and sexual abuse faced by Black women in the US South during the early 20th century.
"From the very first time I read 'The Color Purple' it was a blessing in my life -- because until that time I didn't know that there was language for what had happened to me," Winfrey said after a screening in Los Angeles.
"I had been raped and had a child at 14, who later died, and I did not have any language to explain what that was.
"That book was the first time that there was a story about me."
"The Color Purple" tells the coming-of-age story of Celie, a Black girl living in rural Georgia who is raped by her father and forced to give away two children.
As it unfolds, Celie is forced into an abusive marriage, but comes to bond with and find strength from other women dealing with their own various traumas and prejudice.
Winfrey recalled how, in the 1980s, upon learning that Spielberg was adapting the film, she had "literally prayed on my knees every night for the opportunity to be in that movie." �AFP
