Johnson speaks these days with a slight rasp in her voice but carries the same confidence that prompted NASA engineers to turn to her for help in planning the Mercury and Apollo space missions by, among other things, calculating the distance between Earth and the moon. Henson spent hours with Johnson before the filming got underway, according to her publicist, Pamela Sharp, who said the actress described the experience as “meeting a true hero.” At the time, it was just a question and an answer.” “They needed information and I had it, and it didn’t matter that I found it. “There’s nothing to it - I was just doing my job,” she said during an interview in her living room in Hampton Roads, Va.
PICTURE OF KATHERINE JOHNSON NASA MOVIE
Henson plays Katherine Johnson in the Oscar-nominated movie "Hidden Figures." (Hopper Stone/AP)įor many people, especially African Americans, her tale of overcoming racism and sexism is inspirational.īut Johnson is still struggling to figure out what all the fuss is about. “I’m glad that I’m young enough still to be living and that they are, so they can look and see, ‘That’s who that is,’ ” she said.
Suddenly Johnson, who will turn 99 in August, finds herself inundated with interview requests, award banquet invitations and people who just want to stop by and shake her hand. “Hidden Figures” was nominated Tuesday for an Academy Award for best picture. The movie tells how a group of black women - world-class mathematicians all - helped provide NASA with data crucial to the success of the agency’s early spaceflights. Henson in “Hidden Figures,” a film based on a book of the same name. Now, three decades after retiring from the agency, Johnson is portrayed by actress Taraji P. That she was an African American woman in an almost all-male and white workforce made her career even more remarkable. Fame has finally found Katherine Johnson - and it only took a half-century, six manned moon landings, a best-selling book and an Oscar-nominated movie.įor more than 30 years, Johnson worked as a NASA mathematician at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., where she played an unseen but pivotal role in the country’s space missions.
0 kommentar(er)
