Feb 6, 2023
By: Srishti Magan
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The 65th Annual Grammy Awards ceremony took place on February 6, and 57-year-old American actress Viola Davis won a Grammy for the audio recording of her memoir "Finding Me,” thus entering the elite EGOT club of Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony winners.
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Davis is the third Black woman, and the 18th person in history, to achieve EGOT status. Other EGOT winners include Rita Moreno, Audrey Hepburn and Whoopi Goldberg. Davis won an Emmy for the show How To Get Away with Murder, an Academy Award for best supporting actress for Fences, and two Tony awards for Fences and King Hedley II.
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On winning the award, the actor proudly exclaimed on stage, “I got EGOT!” She further added, “I wrote this book to honour the six-year-old Viola, to honour her, to honour her life, her joy, her trauma, her everything.”
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A Juilliard graduate, Davis started her career as a theatre actor in 1989. Since then she has delivered a slew of power-packed performances. In 2020, she was ranked ninth on the New York Times list of the greatest actors of the 21st century. She’s also the only African-American to achieve the Triple Crown of Acting - Academy, Emmy, and Tony Awards.
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With four Academy Awards and BAFTA nominations, each, Davis is the most-nominated black actress in both Oscar and BAFTA history. Some of her notable performances include playing a tough-as-nails lawyer-cum-professor in How To Get Away With Murder, a housemaid in The Help, and a warrior in her latest drama, The Woman King.
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In June 2003, Davis married actor Julius Tennon and in 2011, the couple adopted an infant daughter. Davis has five siblings - four sisters and a brother and she’s the second youngest.
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Davis’ father was a horse trainer and her mother was a maid and a Civil Rights activist. After her first Academy Award nomination (for Doubt in 2009), she shared with Wall Street Journal, “I discovered acting as a way of escaping poverty and feeling like I was an outsider.”
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Since 2014, Davis has collaborated with the Hunger Is campaign to help eradicate childhood hunger across America. Speaking about the project on The Ellen Show, Davis said, “seventeen million kids in this country, so one in five kids in this country, go to bed hungry. I was one of those kids because I grew up in abject poverty.”
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Beyoncé scripted history by winning a record-breaking 32nd Grammy Award. Meanwhile, Harry Styles won album of the year and Lizzo won the award for record of the year. Indian composer Ricky Kej also won his third Grammy.
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