Movies: Worth 'Waiting' For

Date: December 19, 1995
By Stephen Schaefer

From The Boston Herald
Submitted by: Larry A.


For the record, Whitney Houston doesn't need a bodyguard.

During interviews to promote her new movie, "Waiting to Exhale," which opens Friday, she was followed around a San Francisco hotel ballroom by her agent and various representatives. But they might as well have been invisible; Houston doesn't need anyone to run interference, much less protect her.

She's perfected a look that says, "Be careful."

And, asked what a stranger would find most surprising about her, she replied, laughing, "That I don't take no (expletive), probably."

Houston, 32, an old-fashioned style-setting entertainer with an almost natural larger-than-life quality, is back making movies three years after her debut in "The Bodyguard," opposite Kevin Costner. That movie was a worldwide hit and produced the hugely popular soundtrack.

"'The Bodyguard,' I kid you not, just happened," said Houston. "I had no idea that movie was going to be as big as it was. I had no idea the soundtrack would be the biggest-selling soundtrack of all time.

"I just wanted to do good work and work with good people. So after 'The Bodyguard' was over, I went on tour. I had a baby. I was tired and thought I'd take a break, and I kind of did.

"If I did (another) film, it was going to be a good film with good people, and I didn't know what that was until 'Exhale' came along."'

"Waiting to Exhale" is based on Terry McMillan's best seller about a quartet of African-American women friends in Phoenix, their loves and losses. It co-stars Angela Bassett, Gregory Hines and Mykelti Wilkenson ("Forrest Gump") and is directed by Forest Whitaker.

The soundtrack, led by Houston's single "Exhale (Shoop Shoop)," is already a Top-5 smash.

For her next movie, Houston will command a $10 million salary to co-star opposite Denzel Washington in the remake of "The Bishop's Wife," a 1940s fantasy about a pastor, his wife and an archangel.

Houston, who is outspoken about her Christian beliefs, will sing gospel in the film.

"I don't want to just play movie roles. I sing, that's what God gave me really," she said. "To interpret a song is easier for me than to interpret words."

As often as Houston has been celebrated in her singing and acting careers, she's also been tabloid fodder, mostly for her on-and-off marriage to Boston soul singer Bobby Brown, 26, with whom she had a daughter, Bobbi, 2.

"It used to hurt me really badly," she said. "Now I know it's a commodity, a business, for them."

Motherhood changed Houston's life, she said.

"Giving birth was the most incredible thing I have ever done," she said. "You start living for your child. She moves me, she motivates me. She makes me get up and take her to school. I take my daughter to school, I pick her up. I am a mother, a true hands-on mother, as my mother was to me. That's all I know."

Houston, currently separated from Brown, was asked if she would marry again.

"I'm still married," she declared quietly, throwing that "be careful" look. "I'm still married."