Whitney Houston's big payday for Denzel Washington's Christmas movie The Preacher's Wife

As a singer, Whitney Houston needs no introduction. However, as a Christmas movie star, she can prove to be a little more obscure. Despite this, she was also successful in this direction of life. Not only did she star in the surprisingly good 1996 Christmas movie The Preacher's Wife, but she did it opposite the great Denzel Washington and made a lot of money for her efforts.

A remake of the 1947 film The Bishop's Wife (itself based on the 1928 book of the same name), The Preacher's Wife is a fantasy comedy-drama about Henry Biggs (Courtney B. Vance), an uptight reverend. who experiences a crisis of faith while his church stands in the way of a real estate tycoon's (Gregory Hines) construction project. Fortunately, an angel named Dudley (Washington) and Biggs' wife Julie (Houston) are there to support the preacher. Unfortunately, the two also seem to fall in love. It's a Christmas movie, of course, so despite its potential for heartbreak, the ending is happy—much like Houston's bank account after she landed the role. In fact, her salary for “The Preacher's Wife” was an impressive $10 million.

For context, this was at a time when movie star salaries were rising across the industry, with Jim Carrey receiving as much as $20 million per film. Still, when you consider that the top-grossing star of the era, Demi Moore, took home $12.5 million for her lead role in Striptease, Houston's $10 million payday for a relatively low-stakes holiday film is an impressive haul by any standards.

Whitney Houston was only 48 years old when she tragically died in 2012. Thanks to 2022 music biopic “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody” and the same year clearly Houston-inspired Netflix movie 'Beauty' she has maintained a strong presence in the film industry posthumously, but The Preacher's Wife was far from her only notable film project during her lifetime.

Houston's most famous film is her acting debut, The Bodyguard. Although Kevin Costner was warned off the Houston casting by Hollywood bigwigs For the 1992 romantic drama about celebrity singer-actor Rachel Marron (Houston) and her ex-Secret Service bodyguard Frank Farmer (Costner), the film's worldwide box office haul of $411 million against a $25 million budget speaks for itself. Despite thrusting Houston into an even brighter spotlight than before, the music-filled film is full of great tunes that earned her two Academy Award nominations. It also gave Houston her signature song, a cover of Dolly Parton's “I Will Always Love You,” though not before. Costner had to defend Houston from rejection when her record company didn't like the opening of the song.

Aside from The Bodyguard and The Preacher's Wife, Houston's acting career is best remembered for her role as Savannah in Forest Whitaker's 1995 comedy-drama Waiting to Exhale. She also played the fairy godmother in the 1997 TV movie Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella. Her last film role was in Salim Akil's musical drama Sparkle, which was released in August 2012 – just a few months after her death.