Viola Davis, one of the greatest actors of this generation, has just entered entertainment’s most exclusive and admired club with her Grammy win on Sunday, Feb. 5, 2023.
By winning her first Grammy Award for her audiobook performance of her memoir, Finding Me, Davis became just the fourth African American entertainer to achieve the rare EGOT status.
EGOT is an acronym that stands for artists who have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony Award in their lifetime. Only three other Black people have scaled to that rarified plateau: Whoopi Goldberg, John Legend, and Jennifer Hudson. Eighteen people overall have accomplished that feat in the annals of American art.
During Sunday’s Grammy Awards Premiere Ceremony, the revered 57-year-old Davis exclaimed after winning the trophy at the music-based extravaganza.
“It has just been such a journey,” Davis said while accepting the award, according to NBC News. “I just EGOT!”
Davis then added that she was simply paying tribute to her younger self when she first sat down to pen the memoir, Finding Me.
“Oh my God. I wrote this book to honor the 6-year-old Viola, to honor her, to honor her life, her joy, her trauma, her everything.”
Despite now distasting herself for playing a maid in the critically-acclaimed movie The Help, Davis nevertheless rocketed to higher levels of fame than at any time in her career. And she quickly capitalized off her newfound stardom.
In 2015, Davis won an Emmy for her role as Annalise Keating in the ABC hit show “How to Get Away with Murder,” becoming the first Black woman to win the lead drama actress Emmy. Davis finally captured her first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2017 for her role as Denzel Washington’s housewife Rose Maxson in 2016’s Fences.
Davis had already captured two Tony awards, one for the theater play “King Hedley II” and the other for the Broadway version of “Fences.”
