Actor Danielle Brooks has blessings to count

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I am Terrier Gross. When Danielle Brooks started appearing in the Netflix series Orange is the New Black, as the character tasty. She was astonished to find she was recognized wherever she went. Orange was about women in prison, and Brooks played one of those women.

When the series premiered in 2013, Brooks was a recent graduate of Juilliard, and Netflix was relatively new to producing original content. Two years later, while still filming Orange, she learned she'd gotten a role in the Broadway revival of the color purple as Sophia, the character that Oprah Winfrey played in the 1985 film. Rather than giving up one of those roles, she continued to shoot Orange while also performing on Broadway. The color purple had still been special significance for Daniel Brooks, the original production of the musical was the first Broadway show she'd ever seen.

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