SHE had to shed more than a stone and endure lessons from a kissing coach, but it has paid off handsomely for Beyoncé Knowles, the 25-year-old pop star who is set to earn more than any black actress in Hollywood from her performance in the new film, Dreamgirls.

Critics expect the musical, a lightly fictionalised history of the 1960s singing group Diana Ross and the Supremes, to pick up a series of Oscar nominations after its release in the United States this month.

While other black women in Hollywood, from Whoopi Goldberg to Halle Berry, took pay cuts to appear in films destined for Oscar nominations, Beyoncé saw her fee rise to £5m.

That is twice as much as she earned for her last big film role, as a “black empowered” secret agent in Austin Powers in Goldmember, where she proclaimed: “I’m Foxxy and I’m a whole lotta woman.”

Thanks to the tough negotiating stance of her father Matthew Knowles, a former Xerox salesman, she is expected to make up to £10m from the Dreamgirls CD. Advance orders suggest it could be the most successful double album soundtrack since Saturday Night Fever in the 1970s.

Albums sales declined by 5% last year but soundtracks bucked the trend with a 16% rise and have become more important to a film’s fortunes than ever before. Beyoncé’s CD royalty rate is estimated at 17% of proceeds — unusually high, given that she did not write any of the songs.

It is part of a calculated strategy by her father, business associates said last week. When the film was being put into production at Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks studio, Knowles, 53, told negotiators he was weary of a “racial pay gap” between white and black performers in “so-called liberal Hollywood”.

He pointed out that Berry had to cut her usual £2m fee to £250,000 to take her Oscar-winning gamble in Monster’s Ball, but Charlize Theron, a white South African, earned twice that from a similar budget for her Oscar-winning role in Monster.

Like Chicago, Dreamgirls is based on a long-running Broadway musical and reflects the story of the ground-breaking Detroit trio Diana Ross, Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard, who once challenged the Beatles for chart domination.

Ballard was sacked in 1967, partly because she had put on weight, and Ross was promoted as the face of the Supremes. In the film, a character played by Jennifer Hudson, a full-figured contestant on the US version of Pop Idol, faces the same fate but, unlike Ballard — who died alone at 32 — she does not go quietly.

There are echoes of this rivalry as DreamWorks winds up its Oscar marketing machinery. It was thought Beyoncé, who has sold more than 150m records with the trio Destiny’s Child and in her solo career, would be a good bet for an Oscar nomination. But critics have left advance screenings praising Hudson’s performance as well.

Beyoncé worked hard for the film. The 5ft 7in singer shed 20lb on a cayenne pepper, maple syrup and water diet to appear more like a young Diana Ross. “But I did not feel like myself, and went straight back to the Krispy Kreme doughnut stand,” she said afterwards.

Ross, 62, has seen the film, which opens in Britain in February, but has not said what she thought of it.

The Texan-born Beyoncé, known in the music world for her “bootylicious” curves, revealed she was most nervous on set when she had to kiss her screen husband, Jamie Foxx, 38. “I guess you could say we had a love scene. Now, I am a singer, a songwriter, and I didn’t start out going to acting and people-kissing classes, so that is all very new to me,” she said, “but working with a coach made it easier.”

She has said that cinema remains secondary to her singing career. But last week her film agent, Andrea Nelson Meigs, joined the Hollywood talent agency ICM with a mandate to find more work. Her first job? Beyoncé wants to do a Bollywood musical.

Top earners

1 Beyoncé Knowles £15m
2 Halle Berry £7m
3 Queen Latifah £5.8m
4 Whoopi Goldberg £4m
5 Oprah Winfrey £2m
6 Angela Bassett £2m

Source Hollywood Reporter/IMDB
Based on top film roles and, for Oprah, voiceover in forthcoming cartoon Charlotte’s Web

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