Viola Davis

Davis married actor Julius Tennon in 2003. Through their marriage, she adopted Tennon's two children from a previous relationship, and in 2011, the couple adopted their daughter, Genesis.

Davis and Tennon also formed a professional creative partnership, founding the Los Angeles-based multimedia production company JuVee Productions in 2011. Davis serves as the company's chief executive officer, producing film, television, and theater projects.

Viola Davis was born on her grandmother's farm in Saint Matthews, South Carolina. While she was an infant, her family relocated to Central Falls, Rhode Island, where her father worked as a horse groomer at local racetracks and her mother worked domestic and factory jobs. The family faced severe financial hardship, food shortages, and substandard living conditions, and Davis encountered racism as one of the few African American families in the area. She found an escape in watching movies and performing in school plays and theater competitions.

At age 15, Davis received a scholarship to attend the Young People's School for the Performing Arts. She subsequently studied theater at Rhode Island College, graduating in 1988, before continuing her training at the Juilliard School in New York City, where she graduated in 1994.

Davis established herself in theater during the mid-1990s, making her Broadway debut in August Wilson's Seven Guitars in 1996. Her performance as Vera earned her a Tony Award nomination and a Theater World Award. In 1999, she won an Obie Award for her role in the Off-Broadway production of Everybody's Ruby opposite Phylicia Rashad.

In 2001, Davis returned to Broadway in Wilson's King Hedley II, winning her first Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play. She continued her stage acclaim in 2004 starring in Lynn Nottage's Off-Broadway play Intimate Apparel. In 2010, Davis starred alongside Denzel Washington in a Broadway revival of August Wilson's Fences, winning her second Tony Award for her portrayal of Rose Maxson.

After early supporting film roles in Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight, Traffic, and Solaris, Davis drew critical attention for a single, impactful scene as the mother of the title character in Antwone Fisher (2002), directed by Denzel Washington. Her major screen breakthrough came in the 2008 film adaptation of Doubt, where her eleven-minute performance opposite Meryl Streep earned her Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actress.

In 2011, Davis starred as Aibileen Clark in the film adaptation of The Help alongside Emma Stone and Octavia Spencer, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress and winning a Screen Actors Guild Award. She later expressed mixed feelings about the film, reflecting that its narrative centered white perspectives rather than fully amplifying the voices of Black domestic workers. In 2016, she reprised her stage role as Rose Maxson in the film adaptation of Fences, directed by Washington, winning the Academy Award, Golden Globe Award, and SAG Award for Best Supporting Actress.

From 2014 to 2020, Davis starred as defense attorney and law professor Annalise Keating in the ABC drama series How to Get Away with Murder, created by Peter Nowalk and executive produced by Shonda Rhimes. In 2015, she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, becoming the first African American woman to win in that category.

Davis continued to expand her screen work with leading turns in the heist thriller Widows (2018), as legendary blues singer Ma Rainey in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020), as Michelle Obama in the series The First Lady (2022), and as General Nanisca in the historical epic The Woman King (2022). In 2022, she published her memoir Finding Me, which was selected for Oprah's Book Club. Davis won a Grammy Award in 2023 for narrating the audiobook version of Finding Me, securing EGOT status as the eighteenth person and third Black woman to win all four major entertainment honors.