(Photo: Quantrell Colbert, HBO)
(Photo: Quantrell Colbert, HBO)

Oprah Winfrey became obsessed with Henrietta Lacks’ story along with the rest of the world in 2010, but she never intended to star in HBO’s movie version, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Saturday, 8 ET/PT).

“For years, I was like, ‘I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to take this on. I just want to be a producer,’” says Winfrey, from her home in Montecito, Calif.

But she ended up taking a lead role as Lacks’ daughter Deborah, after optioning  the rights to produce a film based on the 2010 bestseller. .  The book chronicles how the African-American Baltimore cancer patient died in 1951, not knowing her tumor cells were harvested by researchers at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Henrietta’s cells, knowns as HeLa, were later duplicated into “immortal” cell lines used by scientists for medical testing all over the world.

For the complete story, visit USAToday.com/Life/TV.

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