edmontonsun.com - Showbiz: Movies, TV and Theatre - Destiny fulfilled

"I never saw it, but my choreographer and a lot of the people around me grew up around that time and saw it a hundred times and been raving about it since I was 15. "And I bought the soundtrack and imagined, 'Oh, what was she doin' in that scene?,' just pretending I was in the audience.

" Of course, there are no minor roles where Beyonce is involved, including her role as Deena Jones in the Dreamgirls movie, now in theatres. The movie draws from the Svengali relationship Motown founder Berry Gordy had with Diana Ross, the Supremes and other Motown acts. And to that end, Deena's relationship with her manager and eventual husband Curtis (Jamie Foxx) has been beefed up - including a new song Listen, co-written by Beyonce, which is her character's big closing number.

The song marks the end of the musical, with Deena being the last to recognize the cost to her soul of being under Curtis's thumb. "Before I was part of the project, (director) Bill (Condon) thought the second half needed another moment, so he came up with the concept of Listen. And when I joined the movie we started talking about it because I'm a contemporary artist and I know what's on the radio now.

It took us maybe three months to work it out." "Deena didn't have a father, so she used Curtis as her father figure. She needed to get out of the projects, she needed to take care of her mother, she was the lead singer because of her look, not her voice.

"I had both of my parents, I grew up in a middle-to-upper class neighbourhood (in Houston). I went to private school. I'm the lead singer because I can sing and because I write all my songs.

I'm my own Curtis, I control my own life." It wasn't always so, however. Beyonce is still managed by her father, Matthew Knowles, a relationship that she says once was analogous to Deena and Curtis's.

"My father, when I was 18, we had our Listen moment. His idea of overexposure and mine was different. He thought more is more.

I thought less is more. Eventually I had to tell him, 'I'm 18, I know what I want, I'm gonna be in control.' And for about a year or two, it was very strange 'cause I was his daughter and he was like, 'Whaddya mean no?

' "Now we have weekly meetings. He works at his office in Houston, and he has other artists he manages. And we go through our lists of requests and things he thinks I should do and he's told yes or no and we do it weekly.

"And if I tell him I want to do a movie for a year next year in Prague and I want to play a crackhead, then he would say, 'OK, if that's what you want, great.'" As for Dreamgirls, Beyonce says the trickiest part was purging Deena. "Deena never stood up for herself, and was whispering and singing light.

My album (the recently released B'Day), that's why I'm screaming and so aggressive and nothing like who I really am. I had to let go and had to be let out of the cage. So Deena inspired my album.