Viola Davis

Viola Davis WikiMediaViola Davis is an award-winning American actress and producer. Her successful performance has attracted many television viewers all over America since 1996. Davis has won an Academy Award, an Emmy Award, and two Tony Awards, making her the first African American actress to attain the Triple Crown of Acting. 

Davis was born in St. Matthews, South Carolina in 1965, and her acting career did not start until she moved to Central Falls, Rhode Island. After graduating from Juilliard School, a private performing arts school in New York, in 1993, Davis was cast in numerous minor roles in many films and television series during the late 1990s to the early 2000s. Her successes brought her the Tony Award for the Best Featured Actress in a Play for her role playing Tonya in King Hedley II in 2001. 

In the late 2000s, she once again won the Tony Award for the Best Featured Actress in a Play for playing Rose Maxson in August Wilson’s play Fences. In the next year, Davis’s outstanding performance led her to receive a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress and a SAG Award win for starring as a 1960s housemaid in The Help. From 2014 to 2020, Davis played a lawyer named Annalise Keating in the ABC television series How to Get Away With Murder. This led her to another great success in her career: winning the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 2015. In the following year, Davis played Amanda Waller in Suicide Squad, and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. 

While Davis is a well-known actress in America, she has also founded a production company, JuVee Productions, with her husband, Julius Tennon. JuVee Productions is known for its “development and production in independent film, television, theater, VR, and digital content across all mediums of narrative entertainment in Los Angeles, California.” JuVee aims to become a go-to community for younger generation creators, like filmmakers and artists, to have a space to create their stories on a broad spectrum of humanity. 

Not only does Davis have a huge reputation in the production and entertainment industry, she is also widely known for her advocacy and support of human rights and equal rights for women and women of color. She is an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where she supports numerous foundations that provide assistance to people in need. 

Davis’s philanthropy began in 2011 when she donated funds to her hometown public library in Central Falls, Rhode Island, to help prevent its closure with the lack of city funding. In 2014, Davis started collaborating with the Hunger Is campaign to help limit childhood hunger across America. In her interview, she emphasized that the words “eradicate” and “get rid of” are the key motivators to make her join this campaign. She believes everyone should have the “chance to grow up and have a chance at the American Dream.” In September in 2017, Davis started the $30K in 30 Days Project with Hunger Is, and awarded a $1,000 grant to fund the Rhode Island Community food bank, in her home state. In 2018, Davis also donated funds to the theater program at her alma mater, Central Falls High School. 

Viola Davis is not only a hero in the production and entertainment industry, where she has played several roles to entertain a broad range of audiences across America, but she is also a hero in her supportive humanitarian efforts.

The following section was added by The MY HERO Project in 2024:

In 2018, Viola Davis became a published author when she penned a sequel to the classic children’s book Corduroy by Don Freeman, called Corduroy Takes a Bow. In the story, beloved children’s character Corduroy makes his first trip to the theatre and goes on an adventure, exploring the prop table, dressing rooms, and orchestra pit.[1] In 2022, she wrote her second book, a memoir titled Finding Me. In 2022, it was selected for Oprah’s Book Club list. On the selection, Oprah said of Davis’ book:

“There are so many lessons to be learned from this breathtaking memoir about triumphing over adversity and trauma. Viola Davis leaves it all on the page—from her beginnings in South Carolina as the fifth of six children born in a sharecropper’s shack to acclaim as an actor, producer, and philanthropist. I was so moved by this book that I just had to share it with our entire OBC audience.”[2]

In 2020, Davis was nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role at the 93^rd Academy Awards for her portrayal of the titular character in George Costello Wolf’s film adaptation of the 1982 play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. For that same performance, Davis received the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role as well as her sixth Golden Globe Award nomination.

Two years later, Davis starred in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King. The historical action film tells the story of the Agojie, a warrior unit made up exclusively of women, that protected the Kingdom of Dahomey between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.[3] For her performance in the role of General Nanisca, Davis received Best Actress Nominations at the Critic’s Choice Awards, Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild, BAFTA Film Awards, and NAACP Image Awards.[4]

In March 2024, Davis was one of eight women to have Barbie dolls of them made by Toy-giant Mattel, to celebrate the sixty-fifth International Women’s Day.