People

Viola Davis

Acting · follow into films and chains

Biography

Viola Davis (/vaɪˈoʊlə/ vy-OH-lə; born August 11, 1965) is an American actress and film producer. Her accolades include both the Triple Crown of Acting and EGOT. Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2012 and 2017. The New York Times ranked her ninth on its list of the greatest actors of the 21st century (2020). Davis received the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2025. A graduate of Juilliard, Davis began her career in Central Falls, Rhode Island, appearing in small stage productions. She made her Broadway debut in the August Wilson play Seven Guitars (1996) for which she earned her first Tony nomination. She would later win two Tony Awards, both for Wilson plays. Her first win was for Best Featured Actress in a Play playing the titular character Tonya, a woman grappling with trauma and loss in King Hedley II (2001), followed by her second win for Best Actress in a Play playing Rose Maxson, a working class mother in Fences (2010). She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for reprising her role in the 2016 film adaptation of Fences. She was Oscar-nominated for playing a complex mother in Doubt (2008), a 1960s housemaid in The Help (2011) and Ma Rainey in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020). On television, she became the first black actress to win the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series for her role as lawyer Annalise Keating in the ABC legal drama series How to Get Away with Murder (2014–2020). Davis joined the DCEU playing Amanda Waller starting with Suicide Squad (2016). She has also starred in the crime drama Widows(2018), and historical action film The Woman King (2022). Davis and her husband are founders of the production company JuVee Productions, and she is also widely recognized for her advocacy and support for human rights and women of color. She became a L'Oréal Paris ambassador in 2019. The audiobook narration of her 2022 memoir Finding Me won her the Grammy Award for Best Audio Book, Narration & Storytelling Recording. Description above from the Wikipedia article Viola Davis, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

Notable films

Where to start

Highlights from credits and KinoChain journeys.

The Suicide Squad

Appears in a KinoChain journey

Prisoners

Appears in a KinoChain journey

Far from Heaven

Appears in a KinoChain journey

Kung Fu Panda 4

As The Chameleon (voice)

The Help

As Aibileen Clark

Law Abiding Citizen

As Mayor April Henry

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes

As Dr. Volumnia Gaul

Suicide Squad

As Amanda Waller

Chains

KinoChain journeys

Public chains that pass through their films — or name them as a bridge.

Browse all chains

The Melodrama They Never Let Us Keep

Rachel Morrison's Love of Your Life arrives as a reminder: the woman's picture was never a lesser form. It was grief, desire and colour, and the Europeans knew...

8 films

The Cracks in the Picket Fence: Suburban Critique Across Generations

From the manicured lawns of 1999 to the glowing screens of today, this chain traces how cinema has dissected the suburban dream, revealing the isolation, confor...

8 films

Criminal Alliances

A chain tracing the anti-hero ensemble film from its war-movie origins through heist, western, and genre mutations to the modern comic-book iteration, examining...

8 films

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