Actress Viola Davis

I kept promising myself that I would feature Viola Davis on this blog over and over and over, and now I'm finally doing it.  And wouldn't you know it? Today is her birthday!  (She turns 56 today.)

Viola Davis started out in theater, performing in Shakespeare plays like all good actresses do, but she made a name for herself starring in the plays of August Wilson, the prominent black playwright who famously wrote plays chronicling life in black America in each decade of the twentieth century.  Her roles in Wilson plays include Mattie in Joe Turner's Come and Gone (set in the 1910s), Vera in Seven Guitars, about a blues singer in the 1940s, and Tonya, the wife on an ex-convict trying to rebuild his life, King Hedley II, a a story set in the 1980s and offering a scathing critique of Republican supply-side economics.

Some of Ms. Davis' early movie roles were in Steven Soderbergh films, such as as a social worker in Traffic (2000) and as Dr. Gordon in Solaris (2002), about a space station.  She gained a great deal of attention in 2008's Doubt, the film adaptation of John Patrick Shanley's play about a priest who seems to be paying way to much attention to the only black student at a Catholic school.  Ms. Davis played the student's mother.

The 2010s found Ms. Davis embracing the small screen with the TV series "How To Get Away With Murder," which aired on ABC for six years beginning in 2014.  She played Annalise Keating, a law professor at a prestigious university in Philadelphia  who gets entwined in a murder plot with five of her students.  Along the way, she reprised her stage role as Rose Maxson in the 1950s-period August Wilson drama Fences in the 2016 movie adaptation, opposite Denzel Washington.

Viola Davis has won an Academy Award, Emmy Award, and Tony Award at least one time each, which is known as the Triple Crown of Acting.  She is one of only 24 actors - two dozen - who have pulled that off.  She won the 2017 Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in the movie version of Fences and the 2015 Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series Emmy for her role in "How To Get Away With Murder."  And Ms. Davis won two Tonys - the 2001 Best Featured Actress in a Play Tony for King Hedley II and the 2010 Best Leading Actress in a Play Tony for Fences.

In 2020 she played legendary blues singer Gertrude "Ma" Rainey in the film adaption of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, a play set in the 1920s and written by - you guessed it - August Wilson. 😊