Viola Davis was raised in Central Falls, Rhode Island, where her father found work as a horse groom at nearby racetracks and her mother took on domestic and factory jobs. Their income was frequently insufficient to support the family, and they endured grim, rat-infested apartments and occasional food shortages.
As a child, Davis began acting in school productions and theatre competitions. She enrolled at Rhode Island College, where she majored in theatre and graduated in 1988. She proceeded to the Young Peoples School for the Performing Arts in Rhode Island on scholarship before attending the Juilliard School, from which she graduated in 1994.
In 1996 Davis made her Broadway debut in August Wilson’s Seven Guitars, in which she played the long-suffering paramour of a musician recently released from prison, a performance that earned her a Tony Award nomination. Davis returned to Broadway the next year in another Wilson play, King Hedley II. She won a Tony for her portrayal of a married woman arguing for her right to an abortion. She later played a maid who works for a well-intentioned but cloistered housewife played by Julianne Moore in the Todd Haynes film Far from Heaven (2002) and the mother of the title character in Antwone Fisher (2002),
In the Off-Broadway play Intimate Apparel (2004), Davis starred as an early 20th-century lingerie designer managing a long-distance love affair. In the film Doubt (2008), Davis played the mother of a young man who may have been molested by a Roman Catholic priest; her brief performance earned her Academy and Golden Globe award nominations for best supporting actress. She demonstrated her comedic skills with an appearance in an installment of Tyler Perry’s Madea franchise, Madea Goes to Jail (2009), and a guest role in 2010 on the Toni Collette TV series The United States of Tara. In 2010 she also assumed the female lead in a Broadway revival of Wilson’s Fences opposite Denzel Washington (who had directed her in Antwone Fisher); she won another Tony for her portrayal of the beleaguered Rose.
Davis’s performance as a reserved maid at the dawn of the American civil rights era in the film The Help (2011) earned her Oscar and Golden Globe nods for best actress. She then appeared as a kindly stranger who tries to assist a young boy who has lost his father in the 9/11 attacks in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011), a screen adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel. Davis’s later credits include Won’t Back Down (2012), which examined conflicts in American public education; Prisoners (2013), a crime drama about missing children; and Ender’s Game (2013), a science-fiction adventure movie.
In 2014 Davis played the mother of soul singer James Brown in the biopic Get On Up and took a supporting role as a college professor in the romantic drama The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby. She then starred as a law professor in the television drama series How to Get Away with Murder (2014– ), and in 2015 she won an Emmy Award for her performance on that show.
Davis reteamed with Washington for the 2016 film adaptation of Fences, which he also directed. For her work in the drama, Davis won a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award, becoming the first black woman to win an Oscar, Emmy, and Tony for acting.