Rise to Fame
She grew up in rat-infested apartments in Central Falls, Rhode Island, shoplifting food and digging through dumpsters. None of that stopped her from getting to Juilliard, and Juilliard got her to Broadway, where she won two Tony Awards for August Wilson plays. The big Hollywood moment came in Doubt (2008): ten minutes onscreen as a conflicted mother, and Roger Ebert called it the emotional heart of the film. The TV role that made her a cultural fixture was Annalise Keating on How to Get Away with Murder, which she turned into the first Emmy win for a Black woman in a drama lead category.
In the Spotlight
By 2023, she'd completed the EGOT: Emmy, Oscar (for Fences, 2017), Tony (two of them), and a Grammy for narrating her own memoir Finding Me. That audiobook win made her only the 18th person to hit EGOT status and one of three people ever to hold both an EGOT and the Triple Crown of Acting. The 2025 Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes put a bow on a decade of institutional recognition. At this point, the industry doesn't just respect her. It's catching up.
Side Notes
The casting of How to Get Away with Murder came with a side of colorism. After she got the role, a friend reported back that Black actors were saying she wasn't pretty enough to play Annalise Keating. Davis's response was to demand a scene where Annalise takes off her wig and removes her makeup on camera on network TV. That scene became one of the show's most talked-about moments. She's described it as the first role that forced her to stop accepting other people's definitions of what she was allowed to be.