In this TV and film collage, we have the breathtaking Viola Davis and a rundown of my favorite on-screen time of the actor.
Viola Davis, 57, is one of our greatest actresses working today, and she has an Oscar, an Emmy, and two Tonys to prove it.
She’s made a career of playing fiercely independent women: mothers and wives, housekeepers and professors, and even a first lady. Here, six of the complex and complicated roles that have made Viola Davis an awards magnet and my favorite.
Fences (2016)
This adaptation of the 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning August Wilson play finally won Davis her Academy Award, and it’s an emotional doozy of a film. It’s the 1950s in Pittsburgh, and sanitation worker Troy Maxson (Denzel Washington, 67, who also directed) is a once-promising baseball player who was too old to play in the majors once the league was desegregated. Davis plays his long-suffering wife Rose, a role that earned her a Tony during the play’s 2010 Broadway revival, and she bears the weight of his bitterness and infidelity while remaining a rock for her family.
How to Get Away with Murder (2014-2020)
TV showrunner Shonda Rhimes, 52, has never shied away from creating complex female protagonists, but she may have outdone herself with Annalise Keating, a brilliant law professor who wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty. Keating was filled with contradictions, at once selfish and a mentor to her students, arrogant and vulnerable, coolly professional and a hopeless romantic. Watching her work her magic in a courtroom was like witnessing a lioness take down prey, and in 2015 Davis became the first Black performer to win the Emmy for best actress in a drama.
The Help (2011)
In this gently moving Civil Rights drama, Davis and eventual Oscar winner Octavia Spencer, 52, star as Aibileen Clark and Minny Jackson, two housekeepers working for white families in 1963 Mississippi. When Southern society girl Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone) decides to begin interviewing them for a journalistic exposé about the racism they face from their white employers, the tight-knit community begins to unravel as personal secrets are revealed. Despite having to shoulder the burden of systemic and outright racism at every turn, Davis’s Aibileen maintains her warmth and quiet strength throughout, which is especially on display in the love she feels for the young white girl she cares for. Say it with us:
“You is kind. You is smart. You is important.”
Aww.
Waller (2023)
The series centers on the mercurial and political Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), who is a senior civil servant and director of ARGUS. She established the Suicide Squad in her quest to assemble a team of expendable metahumans who would be used to execute covert operations against dangerous threats.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020)
Davis earned her fourth Oscar nod for yet another August Wilson adaptation, this one set over the course of one sweltering summer day in a Chicago recording studio in 1927. The real-life blues singer Ma Rainey and her bandmates (including the late, great Chadwick Boseman) record an album and discuss the ways Black artists have been exploited by a racist entertainment industry that respects the art but not the artist. Davis delivers a tour de force, equal parts regal and raging, sweat-drenched and swaggering.
The First Lady (2022)
Davis recently stepped into some very famous shoes to play Michelle Obama, 58, in this Showtime political anthology series, which also starred Gillian Anderson as Eleanor Roosevelt and Michelle Pfeiffer as Betty Ford. While some critics weren’t entirely convinced by her portrayal, we give her bonus points for taking on the unenviable task of tackling a contemporary figure whom everyone has an opinion on. She doesn’t treat the former First Lady with kid gloves, instead portraying her as a real woman with strong opinions, a quick wit, and a fun-loving relationship with her husband and kids.
#Clique, which of these movies/series is your favorite and why?
