Actress

Her childhood was full of fear and drama. When she saw an actress on television who looked like her, she knew she could someday be like her, but her journey was not easy, as she finally had to ask herself: “Who am I?” Eventually she earned professional respect and confidence to portray characters in the way that made most sense to her. 

FAMILY BACKGROUND

Viola Davis (VD) was born on a plantation in South Carolina, in 1965. Her parents were ‘sharecroppers’ (farms land as a tenant, not an owner; part of each crop is given to the landlord / landowner as rent). She was one of 11 children born into a single-room house. 

Soon after VD’s birth, her parents moved her and two of her older siblings to Rhode Island so that her father could find a better job. He was a well-regarded but underpaid horse groomer who regularly abused his wife after drinking binges, stabbing her in the neck with a pencil or thrashing her with a wood plank. Sometimes VD would arrive home and see droplets of blood leading to the front door. At least once, the father asked his daughters to help him look for their mother, who had run away in the middle of a beating, so he could kill her. 

The Davis family rarely had heat, hot water, gas, soap, a working phone, or a toilet that flushed. Rats overtook their home, so hungry that they ate the faces off VD’s dolls. She and her sisters would tie bed sheets around their necks before trying to sleep, to stave off the rat bites. All this mayhem caused VD to start wetting her bed, a habit she didn’t break until she was a teenager. 

The condition of her home meant that VD often couldn’t wash up or change into another set of clean clothes. A teacher shamed her about her hygiene but never asked the root cause. Other teachers just ignored her. One day, VD raised her hand to go to the bathroom, but the teacher never called on her, so she peed in the seat. The teacher sent her home and the next day, when she arrived back at her desk, the urine was still pooled in her chair. JD surmised that she was so disgusting that even the janitor didn’t want to clear her mess. She was only 6 years old. 

Fortunately for VD, her sisters were her anchor. The eldest sister had recently reunited with her siblings, moving from their grandparents’ home in the South and VD was obsessed with her oldest sister, who had a new coat, pocket change and smelled ‘nice.’ It was the first time that the eldest sister saw how the rest of the family lived, so she decided that her baby sister – VD – needed to get away from this living arrangement. She whispered to VD: “You need to have a really clear idea of how you’re going to make it out if you don’t want to be poor for the rest of your life. You have to decide what you want to be. Then you have to work really hard.”

When she was 14, VD intervened in one of her parents’ fights for the first time. Her father stood opposite his wife, screaming, and carrying on, a drinking glass in his hand like a dare. “Tell me I won’t bust yo’ head open” wrote VD later about the incident. VD tried to push in between them, her 18-month-old sister in her arms, calmly pleading for him to stop. But the father persisted, smashing the glass into the face of his wife, VD’s mother. VD screamed: “Give it to me!” She screamed “as if the louder I became, the more my fear would be released.” It worked. Her father handed VD the glass and she stashed it away. 

CHILDHOOD THOUGHTS OF AN ADULT CAREER

One evening, VD sat watching TV, the only working set sitting atop a broken one, connected to an extension cord from one of the few functioning outlets in her home. “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” came on and for the first time, VD saw a dark-skinned women, with full lips and a short Afro, on the screen. She thought the woman was beautiful; she thought the woman looked just like her mother. “My heart stopped beating” wrote VD later. “It was like a hand reached for mine, and I finally saw my way out.” Her older sister had made it clear that VD could be somebody. The actress Cicely Tyson, playing Miss Jane Pittman, was somebody VD could be. 

Soon after VD saw Cicely Tyson on television, she and her three older sisters entered a local contest with a skit they based on the game show “Let’s Make a Deal.” They won – gift certificates and a softball set, including a bat that they used to kill rats in their home. But for VD, the real prize was recognition – not just of her talent, but of her ‘personhood.’ She later wrote: “We weren’t interested in the softball set. We just wanted to win. We wanted to be somebody. We wanted to be SOMEBODY.”

EDUCATION

When VD was 14, she participated in an ‘Upward Bound’ program for low-income high school students, where the acting coach encouraged her to pursue acting professionally. Later, a teacher recommended that she apply to a national performing-arts competition. She auditioned with two pieces from “Everyman” and “Runaways” which “had a lot of great monologues about feeling abandoned.” She was flown out to Miami for the contest, where she was named a promising young artist. Eventually, she studied theater at Rhode Island College. To earn some money toward her living expenses, she took multiple buses back to her hometown, worked a few shifts at the local drugstore, slept on her parents’ floor and then returned to school in the morning. 

After graduation, JD wanted more acting training, but she could afford to apply to only one conservatory. She chose the Julliard School, squeezing in her afternoon audition in New York before performing in her first professional production that evening in Rhode Island. Before starting her audition at Julliard, she told the faculty: “I just thought you should know, I’ve got 45 minutes,” not realizing that the audition process typically took three days. She explained the situation and the train she absolutely had to catch. “You have to tell me whether I’m in or out.” She was accepted and enrolled in Juilliard. 

But after enrolling at Juilliard, VD felt trapped, limited by its strictly Eurocentric approach to acting. She spent her days squeezing herself into corsets or powdered wigs that never fit well over her braids, listening to classmates ponder how good life would have been in the 18^th century, an imaginative game she thought enjoyable only for White people. VD thought Juilliard’s focus was to shape a student into a ‘perfect White actor’ – trying to make every aspect of Blackness disappear. She asked herself: “How the hell do I do that? And more importantly, WHY?” 

VD applied for a scholarship that would allow her to spend the summer in Gambia. In her application essay, VD wrote about the burden of performing material that wasn’t written for people like herself. There was no cultural connection or recognition – she felt lost and uninspired. 

That summer, she was on a flight to West Africa, with a group of people who wanted to study the music, dance, and folklore of various tribes. Immediately after landing, VD fell in love with the ocean wind, the faint smell of incense, the oranges, and purples of twilight. The tribe with whom she visited embraced her group like family. She went to a baby-naming ceremony, a wrestling match; she watched as women drummed and danced. Her fixation with “classical training” melted away. Finally, after years of acting, she was witnessing art, true genius. “I left Africa 15 pounds lighter, four shades darker and so shifted that I couldn’t go back to what I was” she wrote. 

FIRST CAREER JOBS

VD’s time at Juilliard was ending and she was eager to jump into a new chapter in her life but all the roles she auditioned for – even in Black productions – were limiting. The only roles she was being seriously considered for were drug addicts. She tried out for other parts, but casting directors thought she was “too dark” and “not classically beautiful” enough to play a romantic lead. 

A few plays came her way, but she barely made enough money to live on, let alone pay off her tens of thousands of dollars in student loans. She survived on white rice from a Chinese restaurant, with $3 wings if she could afford it; she slept on a futon on the floor of a shared room. Her agent asked her to audition for the touring company of August Wilson’s “Seven Guitars,” for the role of the strong-willed and guarded Vera, who must decide if she can trust her cheating ex-boyfriend again. She got the part and after touring for a year, she made her Broadway debut. 

VD received a Tony nomination for the role, but her life was hardly glamorous. A few of her siblings were struggling with drugs or money issues and her parents, still together, cared for some of their grandchildren. VD sent home as much money as she could, racked with a sort of ‘survivor’s guilt.’ “If I saved anyone, I had found my purpose and that was the way it was supposed to work” she said. “You make it out and go back to pull everyone else out.”

CHALLENGE – WANTING A ‘RELATIONSHIP’ AND CHILDREN BUT HEALTH PROBLEMS INTERVENE

After VD’s success in “Seven Guitars”, theater parts came steadily, and she finally made enough money to afford premium health insurance. An operation to remove nine uterine fibroids gave her a small opportunity for fertility. She was in her early 30s and every child she passed on the street made her want her own, but she had been in only two relationships, neither of them good and there was no one on her horizon. But a few weeks later, a handsome, divorced Black actor from Texas with two grown children, played opposite her in a scene. Within four years, they were married but the reproductive challenges kept coming. Several more medical procedures aimed to correct her fertility problems were not successful. Eventually, she and her husband adopted a daughter. 

FAMILY EPILOGUE

After years of therapy, VD healed her relationship with her father, who had transformed into a docile, sweet older man trying to make amends for his past; he spent the last years of his life catering to the needs of his wife and family, as if every single one of his remaining days could be an apology. 

CAREER BLOSSOMS

In 2007, VD beat out five other actresses for the role of Mrs. Miller in the movie “Doubt.” It was more than 5-year-old VD could’ve dreamed: acting opposite Meryl Streep, being guided by a famous director, working on a prestige film. JD was nominated for “Best Actress in a Supporting Role.” Though she lost, her professional reputation was now secure and promising. 

When VD got a call to act the lead role in a prime-time drama for ABC “How to Get Away with Murder” she heard from a friend who had overheard some male and female actors, all Black, saying VD wasn’t pretty enough to pull off the lead role. For the first time in her professional career, VD couldn’t shake all the racial criticisms she had heard over her career. She was 47 and terrified but took the job anyway. VD won an Emmy and a Screen Actors Guild Award for her work that season and has since moved from success to success. There was finally an Oscar for her performance in the movie version of “Fences” followed by a fourth Oscar nomination in 2021. 

AN ACTRESS ASKS HERSELF: WHO AM I, REALLY?

Although VD was eventually recognized as a true acting ‘Star’ she began to realize that not only had she remained a terrified little girl, tormented for the color of her skin, but she also defined herself by that fear. All these years later, she was still running, trying to dodge the myriad tribulations – anti-Blackness, colorism, racism, classism, misogyny – that she had faced – other people’s problems with her. 

Understanding her own emotions helped VD be able to be a better actress. A professional observer of actors and actresses concluded: “To watch VD act is to witness a deep-sea plunge into a feeling; even when her characters are opaque, you can sense her under the surface, empathetic and searching. This skill has been on display since the beginning of her film career, after she transitioned from acting on theater stages.”

VD concluded there is so much vanity in Hollywood that she believes people are afraid to take the non-pretty roles. “It’s more important for me to see the mess and the imperfection along with the beauty and all of that, for me to feel validated. If it’s not there, then I feel, once again, the same way I felt when I was keeping secrets as a kid. But the only reason to keep secrets is because of shame. I don’t want to do that anymore.” 

Describing the difference between ‘method acting’ which requires a performer to completely subsume herself into the life of her character, and a more ‘technical approach’ that might rely on breathing techniques to be able to readily cry, VD said “I believe in the marriage of both because I want to go home at the end of the day.” She thinks that actors need to study life itself. Feelings are never simple; the mind wanders off track. “When my dad died, we were devasted. But at the wake, when people streamed through the doors to pay their respects, it became a big reunion of laughing and remembering – real laughter to real joy, then tears. I was observing my thoughts and I went from being devastated one moment to thinking about what I was going to eat. You can’t tell the story of the joy without telling the story of the pain alongside it.”

CHALLENGE FOR A BLACK ACTING ARTIST

From VD’s perspective after several decades as an actress, she says “The challenge for the Black artist is that the audience they’re trying to usually reach are not people who look like us and not people who get us and not people who know who we are. Acting is about portraying people living life. Contemporary Black dramas often posit that black lives are either secondary (best friends, drug dealers, therapists) or extraordinary (healers, fighters, heroes) when life is rarely one or the other.” VD fills in the in-between, recuring stories from the restrictive imagination of Whiteness. “I play the truth and we see it reflected back at us in our shade.”

CAREER SATISFACTION

Only 24 actors have won an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Tony. VD is the only African American to earn all three of these most prestigious acting awards. 

Denzel Washington, a famous Black actor with many leading roles and industry awards to his credit, recalled a conversation with his daughter before she auditioned for the acting program at a well-respected university. She had performed a dry run of her monologue for him. He told her that he had good news and bad. “The good: You are talented. The bad: It’s going to be harder for you because you’re not a skinny, light-skinned chick and casting directors wouldn’t want to see you in substantial roles, rather casting you as a friend or a sidekick.” His advice: “Just follow Viola Davis. Look at what she’s doing, and know that, on the other side of it, even if it takes longer, you can be where she is.”

As one professional observer of actors wrote: “VD’s rise feels like delicious revenge, an “I’ll show you,” pushing past obstacles like a rose through concrete. She fought her way to a position where she could demand the same respect denied to her in her childhood. It’s the same respect denied to her mother, repeatedly beaten; to her grandparents, who had to stuff all their dreams into a one-room house on a White man’s land. It’s the same respect long denied to Black women, especially dark-skinned ones.”

It took VD six years to get “The Woman King” movie made, because studios were reluctant to back a film that featured so many Black women. That they were all dark-skinned – the production cast women from across the diaspora: Black Americans and South Africans and Brits and Jamaicans and West Africans – might have made it even harder. “All praise to Black Panther and its success, because that movie absolutely paved the way for people to see the possibility of this movie.” VD said: “The Woman King reflected all of the things that the world told me were limiting: Black women with crinkly, curly hair who were darker than a paper bag, who were warriors.”

Seconds after VD wrapped her final scene, she talked about how powerful it was to watch these Black women transform into warriors, a sea of dark faces, crested with braids and Bantu knots. She said: “What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls the butterfly. We’ve been so misunderstood. Limited, invisible for so long. And now, people are going to see us be butterflies.”

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This career story is based on an article written by Jazmine Hughes, published within the New York Times magazine on April 17, 2022