Oprah and Danny sizzle in their fist love scenes in the powerful film 'Beloved.'

Ebony, Nov, 1998 by Laura B. Randolph

The first time I saw it, I thought they were going to have to carry me out," Oprah Winfrey says of Beloved, the film based on Toni Morrison's unforgettable Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in which Oprah stars as Sethe, a mother who is haunted by the daughter she killed to keep her from being a slave. "Every single image caused such intense, deeply-felt emotions."

Even now, almost a year after the film's last scene was shot, neither Oprah nor her co-star, Danny Glover, can talk about the movie without those emotions riding close to the surface, without, as Glover puts it, "something burning within."

During filming, there were days when that "something" almost drove Danny and Oprah over the edge. "The day we shot the scene where Danny comes into the house for the first time and has to make that trek down the hall, something just came over him," Oprah recalls. "When it was over, I could see that something had happened to him, that he hadn't come back. He was just sitting in the corner looking so out of it."

Only Oprah noticed Glover's trance-like state. Jonathan Demme, the film's Academy Award-winning director, was calling for another take, and so the task fell to Oprah to see what had shaken Danny so badly and so deeply "I put my arms around him and said, `Danny, what is it? You can tell me,'" Oprah recalls.

She wasn't prepared for Glover's answer. He had seen, Glover told her, several characters in the book. "He said, `I felt myself drowning,'" Oprah recalls, fighting tears. "He said, `I saw Sixo being burned. I saw them all [the men of Sweet Home.'] He said, `Oprah, I felt them; I felt their breath.' And then he just sobbed for a long time."

It was Oprah, Glover confirms, who pulled him back from the brink. It was, in fact, her words, her arms, her comfort and understanding that Glover says brought him out of his hypnotic state. "I just held on to her," he remembers, tears rolling down his face, "until I felt like I could come back."

Like Glover, Oprah had to shoot scenes that she found so intense, so painful, that they shook the Academy Award-nominated actress down deep to her center, her very core. "The first few times I did the scene where Sethe explains what 28 days of freedom meant to her, I could not get through it," she confides. Nor can she remember how many takes she needed to get through what she refers to as "the milking ordeal" -- the scene in which two White men hold her down and suck the milk, her baby's milk, from her breasts. "The first three times I did it I was hysterical," she says, her voice barely above a whisper.

She discovered there was only one way she could get through the scenes without collapsing, by invoking the spirits of the ancestors. "I kept slave documents in my trailer -- slave ownership papers, the lists of property from plantations where the slaves were listed by name, age, price and rank: Big John, $900; Sarah, $800; Little Anna, $200. I would have all of those documents laid out, and every morning I would light candles and say a prayer for each of them. I would call their names out loud. And then I could go in and do the scene. I'd say, `I'm doing this for you, Little Anna.' Or, `Today is Big John's Day.' And when I had trouble on the set, I would go into a corner and call them up."

That her emotions were so raw surprised her. After all, she knew Black, history almost as well as she knew the book. "I thought I knew it," Oprah says. "But what I have come to know is that I had just intellectually, understood it -- the difficulty,, the sorrow, the pain. You can talk about it on an intellectual level, but during the process of doing Beloved, for the first time, I went to the knowing place."

During the process of making Beloved, Oprah did something else for the first time -- an onscreen love scene. The first day she had to kiss Glover, she confides, she was a basket case. "The day of that scene I don't know if Danny knew how nervous I was because I was trying to act calm," she says. "But the truth is, I was a wreck. I hadn't kissed anyone but Stedman [Grahaml in 12 year!"

When Glover told Oprah that he had never done "a stage kiss," Oprah's confidence soared. "I thought, `This is great; we're both virgins. We'll both be kissing onscreen for the first time,"' Oprah says, laughing at her naivete And then Glover explained what he meant. "He said, `Nope, I don't do stage kisses.

For me it's the real thing or nothing.'" Oprah almost fainted. "After the first take, Jonathan took me out in the hall and said, `You have to relax. Your jaw isn't opening up wide enough. You have to open your mouth and embrace the kiss. I said, `Embrace the kiss?!' And Jonathan said, `Just remember, it's not Oprah, it's Sethe.' I said, `Yeah, I know, but she's using my body.'"

The next day, as Oprah knew, Sethe would also be using Oprah's breasts, a fact that caused the actress more than a few sleepless nights. "I had seen the storyboards for the love scene, and Sethe was lying on her back and her breasts were just sticking up there," she explains. "I thought, `This is not happening with my breasts. Maybe I can talk Jonathan into shooting the scene on my stomach.' Finally, I had to go to him and have the dreaded breast conversation. The night before we were scheduled to shoot the scene, I got him in the corner and I said, `You know that scene we're supposed to do tomorrow where Sethe is lying on her back and her breasts are sticking up there? Well, I'm a 44-year-old woman with 44-year-old breasts. When I lie down, my breasts do too, and there is nothing we can do about it. You can't shoot them from the side, you can't shoot them from the top, you can't shoot them from the back. My breasts are not going to stick up from any angle so you need to think about getting us a `breast double' in here.'"