Viola Davis was born on August 11, 1965, on her grandmother’s farm in St. Matthews, South Carolina, and was raised in Central Falls, Rhode Island, the fifth of six children born to Mae Alice and Dan Davis. Her father worked as a horse groom and trainer on Rhode Island racetracks, while her mother worked as a maid and factory hand and was active in the civil rights movement. The family lived for years in a condemned, rat-infested apartment building without reliable heat or hot water, an upbringing in extreme poverty that Davis has described at length in interviews and in her 2022 memoir, “Finding Me.” She has said she and her sisters often went hungry as children, a formative experience that later shaped both her acting and her philanthropic focus on childhood hunger.

Davis attended Central Falls High School, where an Upward Bound program introduced her to theater and helped her get into college. She went on to study theater at Rhode Island College, graduating in 1988, before training at the Juilliard School’s Drama Division in New York City, where she was part of “Group 16,” a class that also included Jeffrey Wright and Liesel Matthews. The formal, classical training she received at Juilliard, paired with early exposure to touring theater in Africa through a Juilliard-affiliated program, became the technical foundation for the stage and screen career that followed.

After Juilliard, Davis spent the early 1990s building a career in New York theater, taking off-Broadway and regional roles while auditioning for film and television. Her screen career began with small parts in the mid-1990s, and she picked up guest spots on shows like “Law & Order” and “Oz” while continuing to work on stage. Her first major break came on Broadway, where she won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play in 2001 for her performance as Tonya in August Wilson’s “King Hedley II,” a win that established her as one of the most respected dramatic actresses of her generation years before Hollywood caught up.

Through the early 2000s Davis worked steadily in supporting film roles, including “Traffic” (2000), “Antwone Fisher” (2002), and “Solaris” (2002), often in parts far smaller than her talent warranted. The turning point came with “Doubt” (2008), in which her single, roughly eleven-minute scene opposite Meryl Streep earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. It remains one of the most acclaimed short screen performances in modern film history and put her on the industry’s radar as a lead-caliber actress rather than a reliable supporting player.

Davis’s breakthrough into leading roles arrived with “The Help” (2011), in which she played Aibileen Clark, a Black maid in 1960s Mississippi, earning her second Academy Award nomination, this time for Best Actress. Three years later she reprised her stage role as Rose Maxson in the 2010 Broadway revival of “Fences,” winning her second Tony Award, and then took the part to film in Denzel Washington’s 2016 adaptation, which won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress at the 89th Academy Awards in February 2017.

Television provided the widest audience of her career. From 2014 to 2020, Davis starred as defense attorney Annalise Keating on ABC’s “How to Get Away with Murder,” a Shonda Rhimes-produced legal thriller that became a ratings hit and a defining role for her. In 2015 the part made her the first Black woman to win the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, a moment widely regarded as one of the most significant Emmy speeches in the show’s history for its direct address of the lack of roles available to actresses of color.

Davis holds one of the rarest distinctions in entertainment: the EGOT, having won a competitive Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony award for her work. Her theater wins came first, with the 2001 Tony for “King Hedley II” and a second Tony for “Fences” in 2010, followed by the 2015 Emmy for “How to Get Away with Murder” and the 2017 Oscar for “Fences.” She completed the EGOT in 2023 when the audiobook of her memoir, “Finding Me,” which she narrated herself, won the Grammy Award for Best Audio Book, Narration, and Storytelling Recording, placing her among a very small group of performers, and an even smaller group of Black artists, to complete the competitive EGOT.

“Finding Me” was also a number-one New York Times bestseller and an Oprah’s Book Club selection, adding a major literary achievement to a résumé already built around stage and screen honors. Across her three Oscar nominations for “Doubt,” “The Help,” and “Fences,” Davis became the most-nominated Black actress in Academy Award history at the time of her 2017 win.

Beyond her competitive wins, Davis has been recognized across the industry with honors including a Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award, multiple NAACP Image Awards, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She has been a fixture on major “most powerful” and “most influential” lists from outlets like Time and Forbes, and her Fences and How to Get Away with Murder-era acceptance speeches are frequently cited as some of the most quoted award-show moments of the 2010s for their commentary on race and opportunity in Hollywood.

Her more recent leading roles, including the title performance in “The Woman King” (2022) and Michelle Obama in Showtime’s “The First Lady” (2022), extended her public profile into historical and biographical work, reinforcing her standing as one of the most consistently acclaimed actresses of her generation rather than an actress defined by a single role.

Davis became a global brand ambassador for L’Oreal Paris in September 2019, her first major beauty contract, joining a roster of spokeswomen that has included Helen Mirren and Eva Longoria for the brand’s “Age Perfect” skincare line. The partnership has continued for several years and has included appearances at the Cannes Film Festival on the brand’s behalf, including as a juror for L’Oreal Paris’s Lights on Women’s Worth Award.

Alongside the L’Oreal deal, Davis has lent her name and image to a range of print, television, and digital campaigns tied to her film and television releases over the years, and her memoir and audiobook success has also functioned as a promotional and licensing asset in its own right, extending her commercial reach beyond acting into publishing and consumer-facing brand work.

In 2011, Davis and her husband, actor and producer Julius Tennon, co-founded JuVee Productions, a company built around developing film, television, and stage projects centered on underrepresented voices and stories. JuVee has produced or co-produced projects including “The Woman King” and television series developed under the company’s own banner, and it has held successive first-look deals with major studios, including an exclusive first-look television deal with Entertainment One and, more recently, a first-look drama development deal with Universal Television to produce the series “Pawn.”

JuVee has functioned as both a creative outlet and a revenue stream, giving Davis producer credits and backend participation on projects beyond her acting fees. She has described the company as a deliberate effort to control the kinds of stories brought to the screen rather than waiting to be cast in them, a strategy that has also diversified her income beyond traditional acting work.

Davis and Tennon purchased a roughly 7,500-square-foot estate in the Toluca Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles in 2016 for a reported $5.7 million, a five-bedroom, eight-bathroom property that includes a wine closet, a saltwater pool, an outdoor kitchen, and a primary suite with its own sitting room and roughly 300-square-foot closet. The couple undertook a major renovation of the home in 2023, with Davis crediting the redesign in part to the West African-inspired aesthetic she immersed herself in while filming “The Woman King.”

The Toluca Lake property followed an earlier Los Angeles home in the San Fernando Valley area, which the couple sold as their finances and family needs grew. Beyond real estate, Davis’s major assets are tied largely to her ownership stake in JuVee Productions and the ongoing royalties from “Finding Me” in both print and audiobook form.