Viola Davis ( vy-OH-lə; born August 11, 1965) is an American actress and film producer. Her accolades include both the Triple Crown of Acting and EGOT. Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2012 and 2017. The New York Times ranked her ninth on its list of the greatest actors of the 21st century (2020). Davis received the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globe awards in 2025.
A graduate of Juilliard, Davis began her career in Central Falls, Rhode Island, appearing in small stage productions. She made her Broadway debut in the August Wilson play Seven Guitars (1996) for which she earned her first Tony nomination. She would later win two Tony Awards, both for Wilson plays. Her first win was for Best Featured Actress in a Play playing the character Tonya, a woman grappling with trauma and loss in King Hedley II (2001), followed by her second win for Best Actress in a Play playing Rose Maxson, a working class mother in Fences (2010).
She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for reprising her role in the 2016 film adaptation of Fences. She was Oscar-nominated for playing a complex mother in Doubt (2008), a 1960s housemaid in The Help (2011), and Ma Rainey in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020). On television, she became the first black actress to win the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series for her role as lawyer Annalise Keating in the ABC legal drama series How to Get Away with Murder (2014–2020). Davis joined the DC Extended Universe playing Amanda Waller starting with Suicide Squad (2016) to Black Adam (2022). She reprises her role in the rebooted DC Universe. She has also starred in the crime drama Widows (2018), and historical action film The Woman King (2022).
Davis and her husband are founders of the production company JuVee Productions, and she is also widely recognized for her advocacy and support for human rights and women of color. She became a L'Oréal Paris ambassador in 2019. The audiobook narration of her 2022 memoir Finding Me won her the Grammy Award for Best Audio Book, Narration & Storytelling Recording.
Davis was born on August 11, 1965, in St. Matthews, South Carolina, to Mae Alice Davis (née Logan) and Dan Davis. She was born on her grandmother's farm on the Singleton Plantation. Her father was a horse trainer, and her mother was a maid, factory worker and homemaker. She is the second youngest of six children, having four sisters and a brother. Soon after she was born, her parents moved with Davis and two of her older siblings to Central Falls, Rhode Island, a suburb of Providence. Her other siblings were left with her grandparents.
Her mother was also an activist during the Civil Rights Movement. When she was two years old, Davis was taken to jail with her mother after she was arrested during a civil rights protest. She has described herself as having "lived in abject poverty and dysfunction" during her childhood, recalling living in "rat-infested and condemned" apartments. Davis is a second cousin of actor Mike Colter, known for portraying the Marvel Comics character Luke Cage.
Davis attended Central Falls High School, the alma mater to which she partially credits her love of stage acting with her involvement in the arts. As a teenager, she was involved in the federal TRIO Upward Bound and TRIO Student Support Services programs. While enrolled at the Young People's School for the Performing Arts in West Warwick, Rhode Island, Davis's talent was recognized by a director at the program, Bernard Masterson. After graduating from high school, Davis studied at Rhode Island College, majoring in theater and participating in the National Student Exchange before graduating in 1988.
Next, she attended the Juilliard School of Performing Arts in New York City for four years, and was a member of the school's Drama Division "Group 22" (1989–93). In a 2025 interview, Davis said that her education at Juilliard helped her become a better "white actress" but not necessarily a better actor. She explained that the formal technical training she received helped her play classic roles from Shakespeare, Chekhov, O'Neill, and Strindberg, but added "what it denies is the human being behind all that, and as a black actress I'm always asked to show range by doing white work." She noted that "I can do the best that I can with Tennessee Williams but he writes for fragile white women. Beautiful work, but it's not me." She opined that black playwrights such as August Wilson and Lorraine Hansberry aren't studied in the same way as the others she had learned from.
Early work and breakthrough on stage (1992–1999)
In 1992, Davis starred in her first professional stage role, an off Broadway production of William Shakespeare's comedy As You Like It as Denis alongside Elizabeth McGovern at the Delacorte Theatre. In 1996, Davis made her Broadway debut in the original Broadway production of August Wilson's Seven Guitars as Vera, alongside Keith David. The play opened on Broadway on March 6 at the Walter Kerr Theatre. She earned critical praise for her performance. That same year, Davis received her Screen Actors Guild card in 1996 for doing one day of work, playing a nurse who passes a vial of blood to future How to Get Away with Murder co-star Timothy Hutton in the film The Substance of Fire (1996). She was paid $518. Davis continued acting off Broadway in various productions, and appeared in bit parts on television including episodes of NYPD Blue (1996), and New York Undercover (1996). She also appeared in the HBO television military comedy film, The Pentagon Wars (1996) starring Kelsey Grammer, and Cary Elwes. In 1998, she played a small role in Steven Soderbergh's crime comedy film Out of Sight (1999).
Film breakthrough and further stage success (2000–2010)
In 2001, she returned to the Broadway stage in another play by August Wilson titled King Hedley II, portraying Tonya, a "35-year-old mother fighting eloquently for the right to abort a pregnancy." Her performance earned critical attention, and she received her first Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play and a Drama Desk Award. She won another Drama Desk Award for her work in a 2004 off-Broadway production of Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage.
Throughout the early 2000s Davis appeared in numerous films, including Soderbergh's Solaris and Traffic, as well as George Clooney's Syriana (2005), which Soderbergh produced. Hers was the uncredited voice of the parole board interrogator who questions Danny Ocean (Clooney) in the first scene in Ocean's Eleven (2001). She also gave brief performances in the romantic comedy Kate & Leopold (2001) and the drama Antwone Fisher (2002). She also played secondary roles in Todd Haynes' costume drama Far From Heaven (2002), starring Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid. Her television work includes a recurring role in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, starring roles in two short-lived series, Traveler and Century City, and a special guest appearance in a Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode entitled "Badge".
In 2005 and 2006, Davis began a recurring role opposite Tom Selleck in a series of films made for television based on novels by Robert B. Parker, Jesse Stone: Stone Cold, Jesse Stone: Night Passage and Jesse Stone: Death in Paradise.
In 2008, Davis played Mrs. Miller in the film adaptation of the Broadway play by John Patrick Shanley, Doubt, with Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams. Though Davis had only a few scenes in the film, she remained a highlight of the film with noted film critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times specifically praising her performance writing, "It lasts about 10 minutes, but it is the emotional heart and soul of Doubt, and if Viola Davis isn't nominated by the Academy, an injustice will have been done." Ebert would further go on to write, "She goes face to face with the pre-eminent film actress of this generation, and it is a confrontation of two equals that generates terrifying power." She was nominated for several awards for her performance, including the Screen Actors Guild Award, the Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.