By Andrea Carlson
At the 65th annual Grammy Awards on Feb. 5, 2023, Viola Davis won an award for best audiobook, narration, and storytelling recording for her memoir, Finding Me. Winning the Grammy award landed her a spot in the EGOT club.
In her speech, Davis said “I wrote this book to honor the six-year-old Viola. To honor her life, her joy, her trauma, everything. And, it has just been such a journey – I just EGOT!”
An EGOT is the achievement of winning all four major American entertainment awards including Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. Davis is the 18th person in history to win an EGOT.
Other EGOT winners include Andrew Lloyd Webber, Whoopi Goldberg, Mel Brooks, and Audrey Hepburn.
According to Vanity Fair, Davis is the “fourth Black person and third Black woman to achieve EGOT status.”
It’s exciting for Davis to be a member of the EGOT club, but it does not really change my views about the significance of the award. I’m neither very excited nor disappointed whenever anyone wins an EGOT.
She is a fantastic actor and she deserves to be winning awards, but I have found when someone wins an EGOT the media talks about it for two days then everyone forgets. It doesn’t have a large impact on anything. Most people probably wouldn’t be able to name many EGOT winners.
57-year-old Viola Davis is no stranger to awards. Davis is a four-time Academy Award nominee, Five-time Emmy award nominee, and three-time Tony award nominee.
Davis won a Tony award in 2010 for her performance in Fences, an Oscar for the
Fences (2016) film adaptation, and an Emmy for her popular role as Annalise Keating in the hit six season ABC show How to Get Away with Murder.
I think Davis is very deserving of all her awards. I believe becoming a member of the EGOT club was always in her future and seeing her achieve it is not surprising.
Davis is a graduate of Julliard School of Performing Arts, and discovered a love for acting at a young age. She has put her heart and soul into every role she’s taken on.
She said in an interview on the red carpet after her Grammy win, “My life has really come full circle. I wrote this book because I was trying to reconcile my life, I was trying to honor the young Viola. I wanted her to be excited at the 57-year-old she gets to become, and this is just the icing on the cake.”
Many of Davis’ most memorable roles are the ones she adds the most emotion to. I find her roles in The Help (2011), Prisoners (2013), Fences (2016), and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020) to be the ones that best showcase her range and ability to use intense emotion to empower a character.
I find Davis’ acting process to be the main reason she can give such incredible performances.
She once said to the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, “I read [the script] over and over and over again… And then I write a bio of the character. The character is always ever-evolving, just like we evolve based on circumstances that happen to us.”
Davis clearly puts a lot of effort into all her characters and tries to create a connection by giving all of them deep backstories. I think It is an admirable method.
Her range of acting has brought her high esteem and is one of the many reasons she was able to achieve EGOT. She has appeared in many different genres of film, play, and television including action, comedy, drama, biopic, science-fiction, and fantasy.
One her most interesting roles is in the DC Universes Suicide Squad’s as Amanda Waller. Characters in comic book films are not always seen as the most in depth, complicated characters, but Davis is able to add many layers to Amanda Waller, making her one of the most impelling ones to watch throughout the DC Universe.
Davis appeared as Waller most recently in the 2022 hit series Peacemaker on HBO Max alongside John Cena, Robert Patrick, and Danielle Brooks.
I find Waller as a character to be very interesting. The new co-CEO of DC studios, James Gunn, announced a Waller series in DC’s new lineup.
I believe Davis’ character will be a building block for the new foundation of one of the biggest and most exciting superhero universes in history.
She has the ability to be a role model to women everywhere. Many of her characters are also role models and add depth to the film, play, and television projects she is a part of.
In a 2015 Buzzfeed interview Davis said, “Do not live someone else’s life and someone else’s idea of what womanhood is. Womanhood is you. Womanhood is everything that’s inside of you.”
Viola Davis will go down in history as one of the greats in acting. She has now accomplished a feat not many in the history of Hollywood will. Being a powerful actress and breaking barriers is something she has strived for from a young age.
Acting can educate, create debate, examine life, and empower viewers. I see Viola Davis as a great example of an actor who can do all these things through her work and characters. Davis said in an Elle interview in 2015, “acting is not rocket science, but it is an art form. What you are doing is illuminating humanity.”