Audra Mc Donald

Audra is a singular artist in terms of the range and range of her skills as a performer and songwriter. She was the recipient of a record-breaking 6 Tony Awards (two Grammy Awards) and an Emmy Award, McDonald was named to Time magazine's list for 100 people who are influential in the year 2015. The president also awarded her Obama's National Medal of Arts for her accomplishments. Because of her soprano's luminous tone and unsurpassed gift of telling dramatic tales, she has found success in Broadway and in the opera, as well as on television and film. Her career has been successful performing and recording performing regularly in many of the top performances around the world. McDonald was born in Fresno California to a music family, received the classical vocal training she received in New York's Juilliard School. In 1994, just a few years after she graduated from Juilliard School, she won the Tony Award for "Best Performance of a Leading Actress Musical" for Carousel. Over the next four years she received two additional Tony Awards in the featured actress category, for her roles in The Broadway productions Terrence McNally's play Master Class (1996) and his Musical Ragtime (1998) making an unprecedented total of three Tony Awards before the age of thirty. She won her 4th Tony by starring in A Raisin in the Sun with Sean Diddy Combs. Then in 2013, she took her fifth Tony in addition to her first award in the Leading actress category. In 2014, the Tony Awards most-decorated performer in 2014 was Billie Holiday, who she performed as the title character in Lady Day At Emerson's Bar & Grill. It's exactly the role she portrayed for her 2017 West End London debut for which she was named for the Olivier Award. In addition to making history with the most awards won by actors in competition, she also became the first to win awards in all four acting categories. Her other credits for theater are The Secret Garden (1993) Marie Christine (1999) Henry IV (2004) 110 in the Shade (2007) Twelfth Night (2009) which marked her Public Theater Shakespeare in the Park debut, the show Shuffle Along or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed (2016) Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (2019) and Ohio State Murders (2023). McDonald was first seen on television in the award-winning Peabody Award winning CBS drama Having Our Say - The Delany Sisters's First Hundred Years. In 1999, she costarred alongside Kathy Bates and Victor Garber in the television adaptation of Disney/ABC of Annie. And in 2000, she appeared as a recurring on NBC's popular series Law & Order Special Victims Unit. McDonald's Emmy-nominated performance as Emma Thompson on Mike Nichols' HBO film adaptation of Pulitzer Prize winner Wit was produced by Mike Nichols. McDonald's return to network television came in 2003 when she starred with Josh Brolin in Mister Sterling. The actress joined The Bedford Diaries of the WB The Bedford Diaries The Bedford Diaries in early 2006. Following the season, she starred as an recurring role on the NBC television show Kidnapped. In the year 2016, McDonald was nominated for an additional Emmy award for her performance as a character in HBO's Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, a special film. The Bite will be a 6-episode drama focusing on a deadly pandemic coproduced by Spectrum Originals, CBS Studios and Taylor Schilling in 2021. McDonald, who first appeared in the CBS Legal drama The Good Wife as U.S. attorneys Liz Lawrence and Liz Reddick from 2009 to 2018, reprised these characters (now known as Liz Reddick) in The Good Fight in the role of an Paramount+ season regular. McDonald received nominations for Three Critics Choice Award awards. She currently guest-stars in Julian Fellowes' historical thriller The Gilded Age on HBO.