Audra Mc Donald

Audra McDonald's artistry is unmatched in her range of talents and variety in her roles as a performer, singer and performer. The winner of a record-breaking seven Tony Awards (two Grammy Awards) and one Emmy Award, McDonald was named to Time magazine's list of 100 influential people in 2015. The president also awarded her Obama's National Medal of Arts for her work. A luminous soprano with an extraordinary talent of telling the truth in a dramatic manner, she is as much comfortable on Broadway as well as on the stage as in her film and television roles. Alongside the stage roles, McDonald has built a career that is a major recording and concert career. She frequently performs in the most prestigious places. A musically inclined family, McDonald grew up in Fresno California and received her classical training in New York's Juilliard School. After graduating, she received her first Tony Award as Best Performance by an Featured Artist in musical at the Lincoln Center Theater for Carousel (1994). In the subsequent four years, she also was awarded two Tony Awards under the featured actress category. They were awarded in recognition of her Broadway performances of Terrence McGally's plays Master Class and Ragtime. In 2004 she was nominated to win her 4th Tony Award for her performance in A Raisin in the Sun with Sean Diddy Combs. And in 2012, her 5th Tony and her first nomination award in the category Leading Actress was awarded to her for her portrayal as the main character of The Gershwins Porgy and Bess. In 2014, the Tony Awards most-decorated performer in 2014 was Billie Holiday, who she was on stage in Lady Day At Emerson's Bar & Grill. It is the same role she played during her performance in 2017's West End London debut for which she has been named for the Olivier Award. Along with setting the record as the most wins in an award-giving category by an actor, she was also the first actor to receive awards in each of the four types of acting. McDonald has also appeared in The Secret Garden (1993), Marie Christine (1999), Henry IV (2004) as well as 110 In the Shade (2007 Twelfth night (2009) and Shuffle Along The Making of the Musical Shock in 1921 as well as Everything That Followed (2016). She was the first to make her Public Theater Shakespeare in the Park debut in Twelfth night (2009). McDonald's first role as a dramatic television actor was in the Peabody Award-winning CBS show Having Our Say The Delany Sisters' first 100 years. She went on to co-star with Kathy Bates and Victor Garber in the lauded 1999 Disney/ABC television remake of Annie as well as in 2000, she played a regular role in NBC's smash series Law & Order Special Victims Unit. McDonald, who was awarded an Emmy Award nomination back in 1999, for her role as a character in an HBO adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning film Wit which was written and performed by Emma Thompson, returned on the network's air in 2003 with the drama about politics Mister Sterling. The film was created by Emmy Award-winning Lawrence O'Donnell Jr. She became a character on the WB show The Bedford Diaries in early 2006. The following season, she was a recurring character on NBC's Television show Kidnapped. In the year 2016, McDonald was nominated for a fourth Emmy Awards for her role on HBO's Lady Day at Emerson's Bar Restaurant & Grill, a movie-special. In 2021, she starred with Taylor Schilling and Steven Pasquale in the film The Bite, a pandemic drama co-produced by Spectrum Originals and CBS Studios. McDonald has a brief appearance in The Good Wife, a CBS legal drama The Good Wife as U.S. attorneys Liz Lawrence and Liz Reddick from 2009 to 2018. She reprised her characters (now named Liz Reddick) in The Good Fight in the role of a Paramount+ season regular. McDonald was nominated in the three Critics Choice Award awards. She appears as a special character in HBO's The Gilded Age by Julian Fellowes.