Audra Mc Donald

Audra McDonald is unmatched with the variety and breadth of her talent as an actor and singer. Her 2015 season saw her win record-breaking 6 Tony Awards as well as two Grammy Awards and the Emmy Award. She was also selected by Time magazine among the 100 most influential individuals and awarded the National Medal of Arts - the most prestigious honor in America for artistic achievement as awarded by the president Barack Obama. Her talents are equally at home in film, television as well as Broadway. Her luminous soprano can make her appear effortless on the stage. Alongside her theatrical work she maintains a major career in the field of recording and concert artist who performs regularly at world's foremost venues. McDonald was born into a musically inclined family in California, Fresno. Her classical singing instruction from The Juilliard School of New York. A year after her Juilliard School, she won the Tony Award for "Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a musical" for Carousel. The next four-year period She was honored with two additional Tony Awards as a featured actress for her roles of Terrence Mcnally's Broadway debuts Master Class (1996) and Ragtime (1998) that gave her an overall total of three Tony Awards at the age of just 30. In 2004 she was in the running for her fourth Tony Award for her performance in A Raisin in the Sun alongside Sean Diddy Combs. And in 2012, her five-year old daughter took home her first Tony in the category of Leading Actress when she played the title role as Porgy and Bess in The Gershwins Porgy and Bess. The Tony Awards' most decorated actress, she was able to set Broadway history when she received her sixth Tony Award playing Billie Holiday as Lady Day in the Emerson's Bar & Grill. This role also provided the platform for the Olivier Award nominee 2017 London West End debut. As well as setting records for the highest number of awards won by actors in competition, she also became the first individual to win the award in the four categories of acting. The other plays she has appeared in comprise The Secret Garden (1993) Marie Christine (1999) Henry IV (2004) 110 in the Shade (2007) Twelfth Night (2009) in which she made Twelfth Night (2009), which was her Public Theater Shakespeare in the Park debut film, 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) as well as Ohio State Murders (2023). McDonald's first appearance as a dramatic television actor was with the winner of the Peabody Award on the CBS show Having Our Say, The Delany Sisters' First 100 years. In the following years, she starred alongside Kathy Bates, Victor Garber as well as others in the critically acclaimed Disney/ABC remake Annie In 1999 McDonald appeared as a recurring character in NBC's Law & Order Special Victims Unit. After receiving her debut Emmy nomination for her performance in the HBO film version of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Wit directed by Mike Nichols and starring Emma Thompson McDonald returned to television networks in 2003 in the drama about politics Mister Sterling, produced by Emmy Award winner Lawrence O'Donnell Jr. and featuring Josh Brolin. Then, in the year 2006, McDonald joined the WB's The Bedford Diaries. The subsequent year, she was a recurring actor on NBC's Kidnapped. In the year 2016 McDonald was nominated for her fourth Emmy Award for her performance in HBO's Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, which was a film special. The Bite is a drama which has six episodes, based on a pandemic, coproduced by Spectrum Originals & CBS Studios. The show featured her alongside Taylor Schilling & Steven Pasquale. In 2009, she portrayed 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 on Paramount's The Good Fight. She got three Critics Choice Award nods for her performance. She is currently in the role of a guest star on Julian Fellowes's historical comedy The Gilded Age on HBO.