Audra Mc Donald

The range and diversity of Audra's work as a performer is unmatched. Audra has received six Tony Awards, two Grammy Awards and one Emmy Award. Audra McDonald who has won Six Tony Awards in a row and two Grammy Awards in 2015 was named as one of Times magazine's 100 Most Influential People. The president Barack Obama also awarded her the National Medal of Arts -the nation's most prestigious award to recognize achievements in the field. With a stunning soprano, and an unrivalled talent to tell the truth, she is as much as at ease on Broadway as well as on the scene as she is in her TV and film roles. In addition to performing on stage, she has built a career that includes a significant concert and record-making career. She performs regularly at the most prestigious performances. McDonald was born in Fresno California to a music family, completed the classical vocal training she received in New York's Juilliard School. After graduating, she received her first Tony Award as Best Performance of a Featured Artist musical at the Lincoln Center Theater for Carousel (1994). Over the next four years she was awarded two more Tony Awards for the category of featured actress. The show she was in the Broadway premieres Terrence McNally's musical Ragtime as well as Terrence McNally's show Master Class in 1996. It was an amazing total of three Tony Awards by the time she reached the age of thirty. In 2004 she won her fourth Tony starring alongside Sean Diddy Combs in A Raisin in the Sun and in 2012 she received her fifth--and her first in the leading actress category for her performance as the title character in The Gershwins Porgy and Bess. In 2014, she created Broadway history, becoming an official Tony Awards most decorated performer after she received the sixth Tony Award for her performance as Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill the role which was also the stage for her Olivier Award nominated performance in the 2017 season of the London's West End. In addition to setting a record in which she won the most Tony Awards by actor, she was the first to have won the four categories of acting. Her other credits for theater includes The Secret Garden (1993) Marie Christine (1999) Henry IV (2004) 110 in the Shade (2007) Twelfth Night (2009) which marked the release of her Public Theater Shakespeare in the Park debut Shuffle Along or the Making of the Musical Sensation in 1921 as well as All That Followed (2016) Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (2019) and Ohio State Murders (2023). McDonald was first introduced to the TV audience for her dramatic performance in Peabody Award winning CBS's Having Our Say the Delany Sisters first 100 years. Her next appearance was that of a regular actor in NBC's Law & Order Special Victims Unit and she appeared with Kathy Bates and Victor Garber. After receiving the first Emmy nomination for her role in the HBO film adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize winning play Wit, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Emma Thompson McDonald returned on television network in 2003 in the drama about politics Mister Sterling, produced by Emmy Award winner Lawrence O'Donnell Jr. and featuring Josh Brolin. In early 2006 she joined The Bedford Diaries' cast on WB's The Bedford Diaries and over the next season she had an recurring role in NBC's television series Kidnapped. In 2016, McDonald was nominated for a fourth Emmy Award for her role in HBO's Lady Day at Emerson's Bar Restaurant & Grill, a movie-special. The Bite is a drama with six seasons based around the pandemic that was co-produced with Spectrum Originals & CBS Studios. She appeared in the show with Taylor Schilling & Steven Pasquale. McDonald has a brief appearance in the CBS show The Good Wife as a legal actress The Good Wife as U.S. attorneys Liz Lawrence and Liz Reddick from 2009 until 2018. She reprised her characters (now named Liz Reddick) in The Good Fight in the role of an Paramount+ season regular. McDonald was nominated in the three Critics Choice Award awards. She appears as a special appearance on HBO's The Gilded Age by Julian Fellowes.