Viola Davis

Viola Davis, born August 11, 1965, in St. Matthews, South Carolina, is an American actress, film producer, and co-founder of the production company JuVee Productions. Born on her grandmother's farm on the Singleton Plantation, she is the second youngest of six children born to Mae Alice Davis and Dan Davis, a horse trainer and a maid, factory worker, and homemaker respectively. Shortly after her birth, her parents relocated with Davis and two older siblings to Central Falls, Rhode Island, while her remaining siblings stayed behind with their grandparents. Davis has described her childhood as one of poverty, recalling living in rat-infested and condemned apartments. Her mother was an activist during the Civil Rights Movement, and Davis was taken to jail at age two after her mother was arrested during a civil rights protest. Davis is a second cousin of actor Mike Colter, known for portraying Luke Cage.

Davis attended Central Falls High School, where involvement in the arts contributed to her love of stage acting. As a teenager, she participated in the federal TRIO Upward Bound and TRIO Student Support Services programs. She also enrolled at the Young People's School for the Performing Arts in West Warwick, Rhode Island, where her talent was recognized by director Bernard Masterson. She went on to study theater at Rhode Island College, participating in the National Student Exchange before graduating in 1988. She then attended the Juilliard School of Performing Arts in New York City, completing four years as a member of the Drama Division Group 22 from 1989 to 1993. In a 2025 interview, Davis reflected that her Juilliard training helped her perform classic roles from Shakespeare, Chekhov, O'Neill, and Strindberg, but noted that the formal technical approach denied the human being behind the work, adding that as a Black actress she is always asked to show range by doing white work. She observed that Black playwrights such as August Wilson and Lorraine Hansberry are not studied in the same way as those she trained on.

Davis began her professional stage career in 1992, playing Denis in an off-Broadway production of Shakespeare's As You Like It alongside Elizabeth McGovern at the Delacorte Theatre. She made her Broadway debut in 1996 in the original production of August Wilson's Seven Guitars, playing Vera alongside Keith David at the Walter Kerr Theatre, where the play opened on March 6. That same year she received her Screen Actors Guild card for a single day of work playing a nurse in the film The Substance of Fire, for which she was paid $518. She also appeared in episodes of NYPD Blue and New York Undercover, the HBO military comedy film The Pentagon Wars starring Kelsey Grammer and Cary Elwes, and played a small role in Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight in 1999.

Davis returned to Broadway in 2001 in another August Wilson play, King Hedley II, portraying Tonya, described as a 35-year-old mother fighting eloquently for the right to abort a pregnancy. The performance earned her the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play as well as a Drama Desk Award. Three years later, she won a second Drama Desk Award for an off-Broadway production of Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel. Her Broadway career culminated with Fences in 2010, in which she played Rose Maxson, a working-class mother, earning her the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play and a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play. Both of her Tony wins came for plays written by August Wilson.

During the early 2000s, Davis built a substantial film career alongside her stage work. She appeared in Soderbergh's Solaris and Traffic, provided the uncredited voice of a parole board interrogator in Ocean's Eleven, and took supporting roles in Kate and Leopold, Antwone Fisher, and Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven. From 2005 to 2006, she held a recurring role opposite Tom Selleck in the television films Jesse Stone: Stone Cold, Jesse Stone: Night Passage, and Jesse Stone: Death in Paradise. In 2008, she played Mrs. Miller in the film adaptation of John Patrick Shanley's Doubt alongside Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She received additional Oscar nominations for The Help in 2011, in which she played a 1960s housemaid, and for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom in 2020, in which she portrayed Ma Rainey. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for reprising her role as Rose Maxson in the 2016 film adaptation of Fences.

On television, Davis starred as lawyer Annalise Keating in the ABC legal drama How to Get Away with Murder, which ran from 2014 to 2020, becoming the first Black actress to win the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series for that role. She also joined the DC Extended Universe as Amanda Waller, appearing in Suicide Squad in 2016 and Black Adam in 2022, and continues to reprise the role in the rebooted DC Universe. Additional film credits include the crime drama Widows in 2018 and the historical action film The Woman King in 2022.

Davis's accolades include both the Triple Crown of Acting and the EGOT. The Grammy Award for Best Audio Book, Narration and Storytelling Recording came in recognition of her narration of her 2022 memoir Finding Me. She received the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2025. Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in both 2012 and 2017, and The New York Times ranked her ninth on its list of the greatest actors of the 21st century in 2020. Beyond her performance work, Davis co-founded JuVee Productions with her husband, became a L'Oréal Paris ambassador in 2019, and is widely recognized for her advocacy on behalf of human rights and women of color.