Viola Davis

On television, Davis made history with How to Get Away with Murder. As Annalise Keating, she played a brilliant, manipulative, wounded defense attorney whose contradictions were central rather than incidental. In 2015 she became the first Black woman to win the Primetime Emmy Award for outstanding lead actress in a drama series. Her acceptance speech, which connected the win to opportunity and representation, became one of the most remembered Emmy moments of the decade.

Davis is also a producer and public figure. With her husband Julius Tennon she founded JuVee Productions, a company focused on inclusive stories across film, television, and digital media. Her memoir Finding Me, published in 2022, became a bestseller, and her audiobook narration won the Grammy Award for best audio book, narration, and storytelling recording. That Grammy made her an EGOT winner, adding to an awards profile that already included the so-called Triple Crown of Acting: Oscar, Emmy, and Tony wins. She has been named to Time's list of the world's most influential people and inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame.

What distinguishes Davis is not only the number of awards but the moral and emotional scale of her performances. She often plays women carrying histories that the world around them would prefer not to see: grief, rage, ambition, exhaustion, love, hunger, and strategic intelligence. Her performances have helped expand what prestige acting looks like in American popular culture, especially for Black women whose stories were long marginalized by the industry.

References:

[1] Wikipedia, “Viola Davis” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viola_Davis

[2] Television Academy, “Viola Davis” — https://www.televisionacademy.com/bios/viola-davis

[3] Tony Awards, “Viola Davis” — https://www.tonyawards.com/nominees/?q=Viola%20Davis

[4] Grammy Awards, “Viola Davis” — https://www.grammy.com/artists/viola-davis/52256

[5] IMDb, “Viola Davis” — https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0205626/

[6] The Movie Database, “Viola Davis” — https://www.themoviedb.org/person/19492

[7] JuVee Productions, “About” — https://www.juveeproductions.com/

[8] Penguin Random House, “Finding Me by Viola Davis” — https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/636029/finding-me-by-viola-davis/

[9] Time, “The 100 Most Influential People: Viola Davis” — https://time.com/collection/2017-time-100/4742684/viola-davis/

[10] Academy Awards Database, “Viola Davis” — https://awardsdatabase.oscars.org/

Silver Dollar Road

Executive Producer · 2023 · Not rated yet