Margaret Avery plays women who have been somewhere and come back tired and amused, and she sings as if it costs her something. One film gave her the part that fitted her exactly; the business could not think of a second.
Fi1m perspective
Watch what Avery does in Harpo's juke joint in The Color Purple (1985). Shug Avery has been drinking and flirting and holding every eye in the place, and then she turns a song towards Celie, the plain woman at the edge of it, and the noise drops away. Avery does not play it as a gift. She plays it as something Shug has noticed and decided to act on, half kindness and half mischief, and Whoopi Goldberg's Celie receives it as if nobody has ever looked at her before. We were not expecting to be moved by a film we had found soft in most other places, and we were, because Avery makes the attention feel earned rather than staged.
That is the performance, and it is warm, sly and a little tired, which is how Shug ought to be. The tiredness is the part other actors would have skipped. Avery's Shug has been a star in small rooms for a long time and knows the price of it, and she lets that show in the shoulders and in the pauses before she speaks. The singing is not decoration. She trained for the stage and has sung for a living, and it shows in how she carries a song without asking the camera to admire her for it.
She came to film in the early 1970s by way of the pictures then being made for Black audiences, Cool Breeze (1972) among them, and a small part in Magnum Force (1973). Scott Joplin (1977), in which she played Belle Joplin, was the first sign of what she could do with a proper dramatic part. Then Spielberg cast her as Shug and, for the length of that film, she had the role her particular gifts were made for.
What followed was leaner. Avery has said herself that she did not work for a couple of years after The Color Purple, and that most women of colour in the business were limited to Black film. The parts that came later were smaller and, increasingly, mothers and women in charge of something, on television as much as in cinemas; she was a regular in Being Mary Jane from 2013 to 2019 and is still working. There is nothing wrong with that career. There is something wrong with a business that saw the juke joint scene and could not find a second thing to do with her.
We have reviewed only the one film, and we did not love it; we gave it a 64, for its softness and its habit of cutting to slapstick whenever the pain got close. Avery is not the reason for the reservations. She is one of the reasons to stay.
Biography
Margaret Avery is an American actress and singer. She is known for her performance as Shug Avery in the 1985 film The Color Purple, for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
Avery was born in Mangum, Oklahoma, and raised in San Diego, California. She earned a degree in education from San Francisco State University in 1965 and began her career in stage productions while working as a teacher. Her film roles include appearances in Cool Breeze (1972), Scott Joplin (1977) and Proud Mary (2018), and she has appeared in television series such as Being Mary Jane.
