Aaliyah’s biopic, Aaliyah: Princess of R&B aired on the Lifetime network on Saturday night but its co-executive producer Wendy Williams as well as Lifetime are still enduring criticism for the “miscasting, bad acting and horrible singing”.
In addition, Alexandra Shipp, the actress who played Aaliyah, didn’t wear her long black hair across one side of her face as Aaliyah was well known for.
Leading the slew of backlash on social media was Aaliyah’s former producer, Timbaland, who was depicted in the low-budget production by an actor who looked nothing like him.
“A lotta people keep asking me if I’m watching that bulls***. Evidently not, no way, not Timbo,” he said in a video posted on Instagram.
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Born in Brooklyn as Dana Haughton, Aaliyah started voice lessons shortly after she learned to talk. Determined to be a star, she signed a contract with Jive Records at the age of 12 and came to popular acclaim in 1994.
But while returning home from the Bahamas after filming a music video in 2001, she died with eight members of her film crew in a plane crash, aged just 22.
Aaliyah’s music has continued to achieve commercial success with several posthumous releases and the sale of more than 52 million records worldwide.
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She has been credited with helping redefine contemporary R&B and hip hop, earning the monikers ‘Princess of R&B’ and ‘Queen of Urban Pop’. She is listed by Billboard as the 10th most successful female R&B artiste of the past 25 years and 27th most successful R&B artiste in history.
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