Viola Davis Biography, Personal Details, Net Worth’s – All About Her Here

Viola Davis Biography

American actress Viola Davis, born August 11, 1965, in Saint Matthews, South Carolina, is renowned for her controlled, precise performances and regal demeanour.

Davis was up in Central Falls, Rhode Island, where her mother worked as a factory worker, and her father found employment as a horse groom at neighbouring racetracks. The family suffered from horrible living conditions, including rat-infested dwellings and sporadic food shortages, as their income was frequently insufficient to feed them.

Davis started as a kid actor in theatre competitions and school plays. She enrolled at Rhode Island College, where she graduated in 1988 with a degree in theatre as her major.

She continued on a scholarship at the Young Peoples School for the Performing Arts in Rhode Island before enrolling in the Juilliard School, where she received her degree in 1994.

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In August Wilson’s Seven Guitars, Davis made her Broadway debut in 1996. Her portrayal of the patient paramour of a musician who had just been released from jail garnered her a Tony Award nomination. She appeared in a small role in the drama The Substance of Fire the same year she made her film debut. Then Davis received a tiny part in Steven Soderbergh’s 1998 film Out of Sight; he later chose her for supporting roles in Traffic (2000) and Solaris (2002).

In the 1999 Off-Broadway production Everybody’s Ruby, based on author Zora Neale Hurston’s investigation into a murder, Davis starred opposite Phylicia Rashad. Before landing a recurring role as a nurse on producer Steven Bochco’s medical drama City of Angels, she had many guest appearances on television. The following year, Davis made a comeback to Broadway in King Hedley II, another play by Wilson. She was awarded a Tony for playing a married lady defending her right to an abortion.

Later, in the Todd Haynes film Far from Heaven, she portrayed a maid who works for a well-intentioned but reclusive housewife played by Julianne Moore. In Antwone Fisher, a movie adaptation of a disturbed African American man’s memoir, she portrayed the mother of the titular character.

In the 2004 Off-Broadway production of Intimate Apparel, Davis played an early 20th-century lingerie designer in charge of a long-distance romance. In the 2008 movie Doubt, Davis played the mother of a young man who a Roman Catholic priest might have sexually assaulted; for this brief role, she received nominations for both the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for best supporting actress. Madea Goes to Jail (2009), a film in Tyler Perry’s Madea franchise, and United States of Tara (2010), a Toni Collette TV series, were two examples of her comedic prowess.

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She also played opposite Denzel Washington in a Broadway version of Wilson’s Fences in 2010, for which she received another Tony Award. Washington had earlier directed her in Antwone Fisher.

She received nominations for best actress at the Oscars and the Golden Globes for her portrayal of a restrained maid at the start of the American civil rights period in the 2011 film The Help. After that, she starred in the 2011 film adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close as a compassionate stranger who tries to help a young boy whose father perished in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Later works by Davis include the documentaries Won’t Back Down (2012), about conflicts in American public education, Prisoners (2013), about missing children in a crime drama, and Ender’s Game (2013), a science fiction adventure film.

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Reference site: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Viola-Davis

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