Livin' for Love: The Natalie Cole Story

A refreshingly honest look at the life and times of Natalie Cole, daughter of famed singer, Nat "King" Cole. The show is intercut with Natalie telling her own story of her struggles with heroin addiction, the long painful road to recovery, and her ultimate triumph as she makes a tribute album to her dad, one of America's best loved singers. She has become an extra-ordinary singer in her own right.

I saw this film when it first premiered on TV around Christmas 2000. I was never much of a Natalie Cole fan until I saw this and now, I have lots of her albums! She is an inspiration to all of us who have struggled with addiction and failing marriages, etc. How great it is for a star of her caliber to have been so honest! Most interesting is her relationship with her mother. She's a great singer now I think she's a great human. Of her relationship with her mother she is so touching in the film when she says she had to accept her mother was "only human". I highly recommend this even if you are not a big fan. Also poignant is the part where "young' Natalie leaves rehab and we see the "real" Natalie.

Love this small screen biopic of singer\actress Natalie Cole. Considering this was a television film, the production values are very good. All of the leads, Natalie Cole, Diahann Carroll and Theresa Randall do an excellent job here. Carroll embodies the "coldness" of Maria Cole. Randall made me forget I was watching an actress. And of course Natalie kills it as herself (lol). Robert Townsend does the directing duties here. And the use of Natalie's real music helps the authenticity of the film, not to mention she's telling her own story as well. Overall, just a good movie.

Natalie Cole speaks to camera in between dramatisation of her life as the daughter of crooner Nat King Cole, with Diahann Carroll playing her strict, prim mother whose emotional distance and initial disapproval of her daughter's singing career strains their relationship. Townsend's telemovie doesn't shy from the drug use, but in order to cover around forty years (the movie takes us to around 1991) in two hours, it's necessary to cut a few corners and compress material, which keeps the pace constant.

The biopic tracks Cole's life throughout her years, including her time at college on the fringes of the Black Power movement where her singing abilities are initially discovered by the band 'Black Magic' (although Natalie reminisces that she doesn't remember a lot of the gigs she played during that time due to frequent LSD use). As her career blossoms, so too does her dependency on heroin grow more debilitating, threatening to derail her early career success until the Lord sends her pastor (and later husband) Marvin Yance to save her soul from oblivion.

From the 80s onward, Cole plays herself including the moment she apparently inadvertently discovers the potential to duet with her now long dead father in a career defining move that would ultimately prove a master stroke.

There's plenty of sampling of her hit songs (although 1989's 'Miss You Like Crazy' isn't one of them) and if you were ever curious about her life as the daughter of the great NKC, or her own Grammy award-winning career, then this superficial treatment might whet your appetite to read her autobiography ('Angel on My Shoulder') from which this preview is adapted.