Viola Davis is an American actress and producer. The recipient of an Academy Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and two Tony Awards, she is the youngest actor and the first African-American to achieve the “Triple Crown of Acting”. In 2017, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Davis’s film breakthrough came in 2008, when her role as a troubled mother in the film Doubt earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Greater success came to Davis in the 2010s. She won the 2010 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for playing Rose Maxson in the Broadway revival of August Wilson’s play Fences. For starring as a 1960s housemaid in the comedy-drama The Help (2011), Davis received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress and won a Screen Actors Guild Award. In 2015, she became the first Black woman to win the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series.
In 2016, Davis reprised the role of Maxson in the film adaptation of Fences, winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She went on to receive a BAFTA nomination for her performance in Steve McQueen’s heist film Widows (2018). In 2020, Davis garnered universal acclaim for her performance in the titular role of the film adaptation of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, for which she received an NAACP Image Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
With that nomination, Davis became the most nominated Black actress in the history of the Academy Awards, with four acting nominations, and the first Black actress to have been nominated for Best Actress more than once. Davis and her husband, Julius Tennon, are founders of a production company, JuVee Productions. Davis is also widely recognized for her advocacy and support of human rights and equal rights for women and women of color.
Some of the best quotes from Viola Davis are listed below.
- “All dreams are within reach. All you have to do is keep moving towards then.” – Viola Davis
- “All you really need to do is shift people just a tiny bit for change to happen. It doesn’t have to be huge and humongous.” – Viola Davis
- “And ‘classically not beautiful’ is a fancy term for saying ugly. And denouncing you. And erasing you.” – Viola Davis
- “And I sit in my jacuzzi with my script.” – Viola Davis
- “And that’s what people want to see when they go to the theater. I believe at the end of the day, they want to see themselves – parts of their lives they can recognize. And I feel if I can achieve that, it’s pretty spectacular.” – Viola Davis
- “And this is what was fascinating to me about ‘The Help’; they were ordinary people who did extraordinary things.” – Viola Davis
- “But the biggest beauty advice I’ve given my daughter is every morning I say, ‘Genesis, what are the two best parts of you?’ And she says ‘my brain and my heart.’ And I say, ‘You’ve gotta remember that, Genesis. You’ve gotta remember that you’re not what you look like,’ you know? I think that’s the best beauty advice I could give her.” – Viola Davis
- “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
- “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
- “Even when I get the fried-chicken special of the day, I have to dig into it like it’s filet mignon,” – Viola Davis
- “Forgive yourself — every minute of the day, every day, that would be number one. You always focus on your mistakes as a mom, and you just have to know that you’re doing the best you can with what you know.” – Viola Davis
- “I believe that the privilege of a lifetime is being who you are, truly being who you are.” – Viola Davis
- “I can’t deal with actors! I can’t deal with myself. We’re neurotic and miserable… I love doing what I’m doing, but while I’m doing it, I’m miserable.” – Viola Davis
- “I didn’t see myself any different from my white counterparts in school. I just didn’t! I thought I could do what they did. And what I didn’t do well, I thought people were going to give me the opportunity to do well, because maybe they saw my talent, so they would give me a chance. I had no idea that they would see me completely different.” – Viola Davis
- “I do believe that there are African Americans who have thick accents. My mom has a thick accent; my relatives have thick accents. But sometimes you have to adjust when you go into the world of film, TV, theatre, in order to make it accessible to people.” – Viola Davis
- “I don’t have any time to stay up all night worrying about what someone who doesn’t love me has to say about me.” – Viola Davis
- “I have been given a lot of roles that are downtrodden, mammy-ish,” – Viola Davis
- “I love Wal-Mart. You can put that down. I love Wal-Mart. My husband and I hang out there.” – Viola Davis
- “I needed to make my wig ogg because I no longer wanted to apologize for who I am” – Viola Davis
- “I own my story. I own my failures. I’m not interested in being perfect. That’s how I deal [with stress]. I don’t put on a mask. I think that the effort to put on the mask is probably more detrimental than just being able to step up and admit your vulnerability in front of people who have enough empathy for you.” – Viola Davis
- “I think that you always want to gravitate towards people who absolutely are great at what they do and go for authenticity.” – Viola Davis
- “I think that’s something that people feel that I do really well; I don’t mind it, because ultimately I think the characters I play move people, and who wouldn’t want to move people?” – Viola Davis
- “I was like, ‘What is this?’ Until I found out it was stress related. That’s how I internalized it. I don’t do that anymore. My favorite saying in the world is, ‘The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.’ I am telling you, I have spent so much of my life not feeling comfortable in my skin. I am just so not there anymore.” – Viola Davis
- “I worked in television; I’m the Failed Pilot Queen, I’ve done so many television shows, pilots, theater … when you do it for so long, I’m telling you, you get to the point where it becomes varied because you take what’s available for a number of reasons. It’s just an occupational hazard.” – Viola Davis
- “I would love to be remembered as a person who used her life to inspire others in any way, shape or form.” – Viola Davis
- “I’m a black woman who is from Central Falls, Rhode Island. I’m dark skinned. I’m quirky. I’m shy. I’m strong. I’m guarded. I’m weak at times. I’m sensual. I’m not overtly sexual. I am so many things in so many ways and I will never see myself on screen. And the reason I will never see myself up on screen is because that does not translate with being black.” – Viola Davis
- “I’m a sitting duck. No, seriously, I mean I wish I could say more, but I’m a sitting duck because I can’t get ahead of them [cyber experts]. They’re far ahead of me. That’s what I learned: how vulnerable we are. It’s a big, silent monster out there. That’s what it feels like.” – Viola Davis
- “Is it just a trend to talk about inclusion (and I’d rather say inclusion than diversity)? Or is it going to be a norm? That we understand that we’re all a part of the narrative, that all of our stories deserve to be told?” – Viola Davis
- “It feels really good to embrace exactly who I am and be my sexy, to be my sexualized, to be my woman.” – Viola Davis
- “It’s time for people to see us, people of colour, for what we really are: complicated.” – Viola Davis
- “Motherhood is 50 million heartbreaking moments, and 100 million joyous ones.” – Viola Davis
- “No matter what, people don’t think of me for glamorous parts. I’ll go to an audition or a meeting in a pretty dress, and they still think of me as depressed or embattled. Hopefully, that will change.” – Viola Davis
- “Sometimes you see how humanity can rise above any kind of cultural ills and hate that a person’s capacity to love and communicate and forgive can be bigger than anything else.” – Viola Davis
- “Sometimes you take a job for the money, sometimes you take it for the location, sometimes you take it for the script; there are just a number of reasons, and ultimately what you see is the whole landscape of it. But I can tell you from behind the scenes – that’s what it is, as an actor.” – Viola Davis
- “The happily ever after comes after you’ve done the work.” – Viola Davis
- “The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity.” – Viola Davis
- “There’s not one woman in America who does not care about her hair, but we give it way too much value. We deprive ourselves of things, we use it to destroy each other, we’ll look at a child and judge a mother and her sense of motherhood by the way the child’s hair looks. I am not going to traumatize my child about her hair. I want her to love her hair.” – Viola Davis
- “They say the two most important days in a persons life were the day you were born and the day you discover why you were born.” – Viola Davis
- “They say, ‘To serve is to love,’ and I think to serve is to heal, too.” – Viola Davis
- “Tyler Perry’s ‘Madea Goes to Jail!’ Which, I have to tell you, of everything that I’ve ever done in my career, that’s the only thing that’s perked up the ears of my nieces and nephews. That is it, that’s done it for them. That made me a bona fide star in their eyes!” – Viola Davis
- “We grew up in abject poverty. Acting, writing scripts and skits were a way of escaping our environment at a very young age.” – Viola Davis
- “We’re in crisis mode as black actresses. It’s not only in the sheer number of roles that are offered and that are out there, but the quality of the roles. The quality – and therein lies the problem. We’re in deprivation mode because me, Alfre and Phylicia, we’re in the same category. Whereas if you take a Caucasian actress, you have the one who are the teens, in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s – they’re all different. There are roles for each of them. But you only have two or three categories for black actresses.” – Viola Davis
- “When you pray, God puts people in your life to lead you when you cannot lead yourself.” – Viola Davis
- “When you see what the deficit is, then you have to do something about it.” – Viola Davis
- “When you’re working as an actor, you don’t think that when you get out of school, it’s going to be so hard to get a job. Just to get a job. Any job. Whatsoever. You don’t think that people are going to see you in a certain way.” – Viola Davis
- “Womanhood is you. Womanhood is everything that’s inside of you.” – Viola Davis
- “You can’t be hesitant about who you are.” – Viola Davis
- “Your internal dialogue has got to be different from what you say. And, you know, in film, hopefully that registers and speaks volumes. It’s always the unspoken word and what’s happening behind someone’s eyes that makes it so rich.” – Viola Davis
