It's official:
Netflix has nabbed
Octavia Spencer and
LeBron James' limited series about entrepreneur Madam C.J. Walker. The streamer made the announcement at its Television Critics Assn. press tour session Sunday.
The project,
as Variety first reported exclusively last August, is executive produced by Spencer and James. Spencer will star in the eight-episode series, which is based on the book "On Our Own Ground" by A'Lelia Bundles, Walker's great-great-granddaughter, who will also serve as a consultant.
The series will recount the untold story of how Walker, a black hair care pioneer and mogul, overcame hostile turn-of-the-century America, epic rivalries, tumultuous marriages and some trifling family to become America's first black, self-made female millionaire.
Walker, the daughter of slaves, was orphaned at age seven, married at 14, and widowed at 20. She spent two decades laboring as a washerwoman, earning $1.50 a week. Everything changed, though, following Walker's discovery of a revolutionary hair care formula for black women. By the time she died in 1919, she had built a beauty empire from the ground up, amassing wealth unprecedented among black women.
