Sophie Okonedo is a great actress who despite having a few leading roles has not yet broken forward as a major talent. Now though she's set to star in a film called Skin which is the true story of a girl who is born to two white parents in apartheid South Africa and a genetic twist gives her dark skin and frizzy hair causing her to be "reclassified" as black and forcibly removed from the whites-only life.

The story sounds quite harrowing because her parents fought to keep her in the school she was attending, but the authorities pulled her out and she was forced to live on the other divide of the apartheid barrier. She later ran off with a black man and fell apart from her parents.

Unbelievably this is a true story and is adapted from the book When She Was White by Judith Stone which is the biography of Sandra Laing, the girl who lived through this bizarre twist of genetics and this horrible view of apartheid life.

The story comes from Variety.

You may know Okonedo from Hotel Rwanda (Filmstalker review), Aeon Flux (Filmstalker review), and she's set to appear in Black Water Transit. She's the kind of actress you recognise from roles but she never really gets a chance to shine. I actually think she rather did in Rwanda and Flux, but there we go. It'll be good to see her get more of these challenging roles and hopefully Hollywood will sit up and take notice of her more.