Oscar Profile #365: Viola Davis

Born August 11, 1965 in St. Matthews, South Carolina, the fifth of six children whose father was a horse trainer and whose mother was a maid. Two months after she was born, her parents moved her and three of her siblings to Cedar Falls, Rhode Island, leaving her two oldest siblings with her grandparents. She became interested in acting while attending Cedar Falls High School, and after graduation she attended Rhode Island College, majoring in drama, graduating in 1988.

Regional theatre eventually led to Broadway and a role in the 1996 production, Seven Guitars, the same year she made her film debut in a small role in Substance of Fire. Frequently seen in guest appearance on TV, Davis also found occasional work on the big screen in such films as Out of Sight, Traffic, Kate & Leopold, Far from Heaven, Antwone Fisher, Syriana and World Trade Center in the next decade, with time out for a return to Broadway in 2001’s King Hedley II for which she won both a Tony and a Drama Desk Award. She won a second Drama Desk award for 2004’s Intimate Apparel, the year after she married her husband, Julius Tennon. They would adopt an infant daughter named Genesis in 2011.

Davis received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for 2008’s Doubt. In 2010, she returned to Broadway in the revival of Fences, earning a Best Actress Tony in the role that previously won Mary Alice a Best Featured Actress Tony. The following year she earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actress for The Help, and also played a prominent part in that year’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. She also had an important role in 2012’s Won’t Back Down.

2013 found Davis in major supporting roles in Prisoners and Ender’s Game. In 2014 she was in The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby and Get on Up in which she played James Brown’s mother. Her daughter, then 3, played her daughter in the film. That same year, she began work on her highly successful TV mystery series, How to Get Away with Murder, for which she won numerous awards including an Emmy on her first nomination with successive nominations the next two years.

Davis became the first African-American actress to receive three Oscar nominations with her Best Supporting Actress nomination for 2016’s Fences, the same role for which she won the Best Actress Tony six years earlier. Her win earned her the rare distinction of being a winner of the triple crown of acting awards – Oscar, Tony and Emmy.

One of the busiest actresses around, Davis just completed filming of Steve McQueen’s Widows, and is planning a film based on the life of Harriet Tubman, the Civil War Nurse, Suffragist and Civil rights activist, in which she will play Tubman.

Viola Davis is 52.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

ANTWONE FISHER (2002), directed by Denzel Washington

Eight years before she won a Tony playing opposite Denzel Washington in the Broadway revival of Fences, and fourteen years before she won an Oscar for being directed by him in the film version in which he also starred, Davis received her first film awards recognition with a Spirit award nomination from Film Independent for her portrayal of the real life’s Fisher’s birth mother. Derek Luke won the award for Best Male Lead, but Davis’s nomination is remarkable for what was a wordless one scene role, albeit one played with the intensity with which we’ve come to expect from her.

DOUBT (2008), directed by John Patrick Shanley

Davis had another one-scene wonder of a performance in this intense adaptation of Shanley’s 2005 award-winning play, written for the screen and directed by the author. The film received five Oscar nominations in all, including one for Shanley for his adaptation, as well as acting nods for Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams and Davis. Although she has just the one scene, it was a powerful one, one that had earned Adriane Lenox a Tony for her equally intense portrayal of the mother of an abused child in the Broadway version of the play which pits a nun against a priest.

THE HELP (2011), directed by Tate Taylor

A box-office phenomenon, Taylor’s film version of Kathryn Stockett’s best-seller Was destined from the start to bring Davis further awards recognition. Second billed behind Emma Stone as a maid in the deep south during the turbulent 1960s, and ahead of Jessica Chastain and Octavia Spencer, who also had superbly written roles, the only question was whether her Oscar nomination would come in the lead or supporting category. A supporting nod would all but guarantee her a win, but she opted for lead, losing to her friend, Meryl Streep. Spencer and Chastain were nominated in support. Spencer won.

WON’T BACK DOWN (2012), directed by Daniel Barnz

Davis had another strong co-lead, along with Maggie Gyllenhaal, in this story of two determined mothers facing an intrenched bureaucracy looking to transform the inner-city school in which Davis teaches, to a place that provides a better opportunity for their children. Oscar Isaac had a breakout role as Davis’s fellow teacher and Gyllenhaal’s supportive lover, with veteran Oscar winner Holly Hunter and nominees Rosie Perez and Marie Jean-Baptiste providing superb support. It’s the performances of these six players that make the film into something more than a glorified TV movie-of-the-week.

FENCES (2016), directed by Denzel Washington

Although Mary Alice had won a Tony for paying the stay-at-home wife of a hard-working African-American man in the original 1985 Broadway version of the play, Davis campaigned hard for a nomination as lead and not only received a nomination, but won the award in the 2010 revival. She fought equally hard for a lead Oscar nomination for The Help which she received, but lost the Oscar to Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady. This time around, she campaigned in support, was nominated in that category and won, completing her triple crown wins of Tony, Emmy (for How to Get Away with Murder) and Oscar in that order.