When a beautiful baby girl was born on Jan. 31, 1977, it was the answer to her parents’ hopes and dreams. Valerie Washington, an education professor from the Bronx, had tried for years to get pregnant. With the first test tube baby a year away, doctors did not know what they do now about maximizing a woman’s fertility. But the Washingtons persevered.
Their much-wanted daughter grew up to be actress Kerry Washington. While she’d heard about those trying years before her birth, it wasn’t until making “Mother and Child” that she fully understood what her mother went through.
Washington plays Lucy, a successful owner of a bakery who is frustrated in her attempts to become pregnant. Feeling her way through the adoption process puts her in touch with the mothers in the title played by Annette Bening, Naomi Watts and Eileen Ryan (Sean Penn’s real-life mother).
“Doing the film definitely brought me closer to my mother because we talked about how much she had wanted to be a mother. Now that I am closer to the age she was when she had me I can understand it more,” Washington says, coddling a cup of coffee at a cafe during the Sundance Film Festival. It’s mid-morning, but she already is photo ready in an emerald-green cowl-neck sweater and oversize pearl hoop earrings.
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