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Echoing the way Davis has long been given credit for shaping Houston’s music and public image, the media narrative around the movie suggested that Costner was the behind-the-scenes maker of her acting career. Her role in The Bodyguard as Rachel Marron, a huge pop star who falls in love with Kevin Costner’s character and is later literally rescued by him, arguably played into the ultimate “ white savior” script. Her performance of black femininity through so-called universal love songs and scripts often produced by white men seems to confirm that, as a recent documentary suggested, her persona was made palatable to white audiences at the expense of her true identity.Īnd it’s possible to slot The Bodyguard - with its interracial romance and huge “crossover” appeal - into that ultimately tragic plotline. If she was once seen as a victim of Bobby Brown, more recently she’s been depicted as whitewashed and kept in the closet by record producer Clive Davis and her mother, Cissy Houston. Since Houston’s death, the endlessly revisited tabloid drama around her life has sometimes threatened to overshadow her musical legacy. The only thing that could compare with that kind of sales was Thriller, Michael Jackson.” But for all the memorials and the focus on “I Will Always Love You,” Houston herself is rarely credited with shaping the project’s cross-platform success. “It was number one, the biggest soundtrack for movies of all time,” producer Narada Michael Walden, who worked with Houston on the Bodyguard album as well as some of her other biggest hits, said in a phone interview in November. But it endures as a cultural touchstone, and that’s primarily thanks to the film’s now-iconic songs, and to the performer who sang them. The Bodyguard, judged purely on its cinematic merits, doesn’t necessarily hold up as well. It’s rare for a pop star to appear in a movie that actually expands their music stardom Prince’s Purple Rain is one of the few successful examples, and that project is seen as the epitome of his defiant “genre-hopping, gender-fluid” sensibility. And Christina Aguilera’s emotional tribute to the film's music at the American Music Awards this past weekend was yet another reminder of the way the soundtrack is deeply interwoven into popular culture.Īt some point in their career, almost every pop star attempts to transition into acting, and the results range from the outrageously bad (Mariah’s Glitter, Madonna’s Body of Evidence) to the middling (Beyoncé in Dreamgirls, Michael Jackson in The Wiz). The Bodyguard’s soundtrack was recently turned into a successful musical, which doubles as a celebration of Houston’s career. The heartbreak ballad remains the best-selling single by a woman in music history, and is still culturally resonant as the object of endless drag homages, talent show displays, and, this year, as a musical punchline in the movie The Hitman’s Bodyguard. The unusual a capella opening of the song - still a rarity for a radio single - explicitly foregrounded the intimacy of “The Voice,” and became indelibly associated with Houston and her image. 1 for 14 weeks and helped the movie’s original soundtrack album become the best-selling in US history, with sales now totaling 17 million. It’s been 25 years since Whitney Houston broke sales records with the soundtrack of the blockbuster melodrama The Bodyguard, best remembered for Houston’s cover of the iconic Dolly Parton breakup song “I Will Always Love You.” In 1992, the song shot to No.