Audra Mc Donald

Audra Mcdonald stands out as a truly unique artist due to the range and variety of her talent as an actress and a vocalist. Her record-breaking success includes six Tony Awards two Grammy Awards and the Emmy Award in 2015 she was named among Time magazine's 100 most influential people. She also received the National Medal of Arts, America's most prestigious honor for achievements in this field -- from the President Barack Obama. She has a voice of unparalleled beauty and a gift for dramatizing truth, her roles in Broadway or in the opera have the same aplomb with roles in film as well as on TV. In addition to her theatre performance, she enjoys an active career as a recording and concert artist. She has a regular performance schedule in the finest venues of the world. Born into a musical family McDonald grew up at Fresno California and received her classical vocal training at New York's Juilliard School. After graduating, she won her debut Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured actress in musical for Carousel at the Lincoln Center Theater (1994). In the time following she won two additional Tony Awards as a featured actress of Terrence Mcnally's Broadway debuts Master Class (1996) and Ragtime (1998) which gave her an overall total of three Tony Awards at the age at just thirty. She received her fourth Tony in 2004 when she starred alongside Sean Diddy Combs in A Raisin in the Sun as well as in 2012. In 2012, she took home five Tonys, her first award in the category of lead actress for her performance of The Gershwins Porgy and Bess in the lead role. She is the Tony Awards' most decorated performer, she had the chance to set Broadway record-breaking history when she took home her sixth Tony Award for acting in Billie Holiday as Lady Day in the Emerson's Bar & Grill. This role also provided the platform to make the Olivier Award nominee 2017 London West End debut. In addition to setting records for the highest number of successful wins for an actor, she was also the first person to receive distinctions across every category of acting. McDonald is also featured in The Secret Garden (1993), Marie Christine (1999), Henry IV (2004) and 110 in the Shade (2007 Twelfth night (2009) and the film Shuffle Along: A Musical Shock Story: Making of the Musical Shock of 1921, and All That Followed (2016). McDonald was the first actress to be awarded in the four categories of acting. McDonald was introduced to the public via television as a dramatic actress by Peabody Award winning CBS's Having Our Say: A look at the Delany Sisters first 100 years. Following her appearance with Kathy Bates, Victor Garber along with other stars in the well-received Disney/ABC remake Annie during 1999 McDonald appeared as the role of a regular in NBC's Law & Order Special Victims Unit. The following year, she received their first Emmy nomination for her performance in the HBO film adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Wit, written by Mike Nichols and starring Emma Thompson McDonald returned to television networks in 2003 in the political drama Mister Sterling, produced by Emmy Award winner Lawrence O'Donnell Jr. and starring Josh Brolin. She joined in the ensemble of the The Bedford Diaries on the WB. The Bedford Diaries and over her next season, she appeared in an recurring role in NBC's drama series Kidnapped. McDonald got a 4th Emmy award in recognition of her role in the HBO film special Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill, in the year 2016. The actress starred 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. She starred in 2009 as U.S. Attorney Liz Lawrence on CBS's drama about lawyers The Good Wife. In 2018, McDonald reprised her role as Liz Reddick as a regular in Paramount+'s The Good Fight. She earned three Critics Choice Award nods for this performance. The actress is currently an actor in Julian Fellowes' historical drama The Gilded Age, which can be seen on HBO.