Audra Mc Donald

Audra McDonald's talents are unmatched in its breadth and diversity in her roles as a performer, singer and actor. She was the recipient of record-breaking seven Tony Awards two Grammy Awards and an Emmy Award in 2015 she was selected as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people and received the National Medal of Art, which is America's highest award for accomplishment in the field--from President Barack Obama. Blessed with a luminous soprano, and an unrivalled talent of telling the truth in a dramatic manner She is equally as at ease on Broadway and on the opera stage as in her TV and film roles. Her career has been successful performing and recording performing regularly in several of the most famous venues around the globe. McDonald was brought up in Fresno California by her musical parents and studied classical singing at the Juilliard School, New York. Following her graduation, she was awarded her very first Tony Award as Best Performance by a Featured Actor in an Musical in the Lincoln Center Theater for Carousel (1994). Over the next four years, she won two more Tony Awards as a featured actress for her roles on Terrence Mcnally's Broadway debuts Master Class (1996) and Ragtime (1998). She has a total of Tony Awards is unprecedented at 3 before the age of 30. In 2004 she won her fourth Tony for her role as Sean Diddy Combs in A Raisin in the Sun and in 2012 she won her fifth--and her first for the category of leading actress in the role of her lead in The Gershwins Porgy and Bess. The year 2014 saw her make Broadway history, becoming one of the Tony Awards most decorated performer in six awards for her portrayal of Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill the role that also served as the basis for her Olivier Award-nominated 2017 debut in the London's West End. She also set the record of having the most awards received by an actor. McDonald has also appeared on The Secret Garden (1993), Marie Christine (1999), Henry IV (2004), 110 in The Shade (2007 Twelfth night (2009) and Shuffle Along: the Making of the Musical Shock of 1921 and All That Followed (2016). She was the first to make her Public Theater Shakespeare in the Park debut in Twelfth Nacht (2009). It was the Peabody Award-winning CBS show Having Our Say The Delany Sisters First 100 Years that first introduced McDonald to the television audience as a dramatic actress. After starring with Kathy Bates, Victor Garber as well as others in the critically popular Disney/ABC remake of Annie in 1999, McDonald appeared as an recurring role in the network's Law & Order Special Victims Unit. McDonald, who earned an Emmy Award nomination for 1999 for her performance on the HBO remake of the Pulitzer Prize-winning film Wit with Emma Thompson, returned with the company in 2003 to star in the political drama Mister Sterling. The film was produced by Emmy Award-winning Lawrence O'Donnell Jr. The Bedford Diaries, a WB television show that premiered in the year 2006. She then had the privilege of playing a regular role in NBC's Kidnapped within the next year. McDonald was awarded a fourth Emmy for her portrayal of Lady Day in Emerson's Bar & Grill, which aired on HBO in the year 2016. McDonald starred along with Taylor Schilling and Steven Pasquale in The Bite a six-episode pandemic-themed show co-produced by Spectrum Originals and CBS Studios in 2021. McDonald played U.S. prosecutor Liz Lawrence, a character she first played in CBS's The Good Wife legal drama in the year 2009. The role was reprised in the year 2018, playing Season main character Liz Reddick in Paramount+'s The Good Fight. In recognition of her performance, McDonald received three Critics Choice Award nominated. The actress also appeared in Julian Fellowes historical drama The Gilded Age.