When Whoopi Goldberg went to last year's Cannes film festival, one French tourist on the beachfront thought she was Michael Jackson, reports Reuter.
This time around, however, the actress was quite unmistakable, both in her forthright interviews and news conferences and in her two films that showed at the festival, "The Player" and "Sarafina!.""People always want me to play downtrodden black women. Well I'm already black and downtrodden in life, so why should I have to be in the movies?" she said. In "The Player," Robert Altman's acclaimed satire on Hollywood, she appears as an eccentric detective investigating a murder. The detective's color has no bearing on teh plot. "Sarafina!," a powerful political musical about children in the South African township of Soweto, is a rather more serious business. Goldberg plays a schoolteacher who refuses to let the imposition of a white-authorized syllabus stop her telling the truth to her pupils.