One day, circa 2000, Rebecca Skloot was riding in a car with Deborah Lacks, whose late mother, Henrietta, had posthumously and unwittingly contributed to some of the most important medical research of the 20th century.

At the time, Skloot was a scrappy but barely published young journalist, and it would take a decade for her to complete the nonfiction book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” But Lacks had a prescient vision:

” ‘This book is going to come out and it’s going to be a bestseller. There’s going to be a movie. Oprah is going to star in it,’ ” Skloot recalls Lacks saying during that drive. “And I was there going, ‘Deborah, Deborah, whoa, whoa, that’s crazy. Let’s be realistic here.’ ”

Nearly two decades later, Lacks’ prediction — which Skloot had forgotten until she recently unearthed it on an old audiotape — has been realized. Not only did Skloot’s 2010 book become a runaway bestseller, but it also has been adapted into a movie starring, yes, Oprah Winfrey.

Co-written and directed by George C. Wolfe and premiering Saturday on HBO, the film follows Skloot (Rose Byrne) and Deborah Lacks (Winfrey) on a journey to understand more about Henrietta, who died of cervical cancer at age 31 in 1951, leaving behind five small children and a legacy that would change modern medicine.

Read more of the original post: Oprah Winfrey in HBO’s ‘Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’ makes a 17-year-old prediction come true — http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-st-immortal-life-of-henrietta-lacks-oprah-20170420-story.html