Audra Mc Donald

Audra is a unique artist because of her range and range of her skills as a songwriter and performer. She was the recipient of record-breaking 6 Tony Awards as well as two Grammy Awards and Emmy Awards. Her name was also cited in Time magazine among the 100 most influential people, and she was also received the National Medal of Arts - the most prestigious honor given in America for artistic achievement by President Barack Obama. Blessed with a luminous soprano, and an unrivalled talent for dramatic truth-telling, she is as much at home in Broadway and the opera scene as she is in her film and television roles. As well as performing on stage, she has built a career that is a major recording and concert career. She regularly performs at top places. McDonald was raised at Fresno California by her musical parents. They also studied classical singing at the Juilliard School, New York. After graduating, McDonald received the Tony Award Best Performance for the Lead Actress of a Musical for her performance in Carousel in the Lincoln Center Theater. In the four following years, she was awarded two additional Tony Awards as a featured actress for her roles as a featured actress in Terrence Mcnally's Broadway debuts Master Class (1996) and Ragtime (1998). The total number of Tony Awards is unprecedented at three prior to the age of 30. The year 2004, she took home her fourth Tony for her role on stage in A Raisin in the Sun with Sean Diddy Combs. Then in 2013, she brought home her 5th Tony, and also her 1st in the Leading actress category. In 2014 she made Broadway history by becoming one of the Tony Awards most decorated performer in her sixth award in the role of Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill the role which was also the basis for her Olivier Award nominated 2017 debut in the London's West End. As well as recording the record for the highest number of performances that an actor has won in a competition she was also the first to win honors in all four acting categories. McDonald was also seen on The Secret Garden (1993), Marie Christine (1999), Henry IV (2004) and 110 in The Shade (2007 Twelfth night (2009) and Shuffle Along Shuffle Along: the Making of the Musical Shock of 1921 and Everything That Followed (2016). She was the first to make her Public Theater Shakespeare in the Park debut with Twelfth night (2009). McDonald was first seen on TV as a character actor in her role on the Peabody Award winner CBS series Having Our Say - The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years. In 1999, she costarred alongside Kathy Bates and Victor Garber on the ABC/Disney television version of Annie. Then, in 2000, she played a recurring on NBC's popular program 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 written by Mike Nichols. McDonald's return to network television was in 2003, in which she co-starred with Josh Brolin in Mister Sterling. Early in 2006, McDonald joined the WB's The Bedford Diaries. The next year she was an actor in NBC's Kidnapped. McDonald was awarded the 4th Emmy nomination in recognition of her part in HBO's film special of Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill in the year 2016. In 2021, she appeared with Taylor Schilling and Steven Pasquale as part of The Bite, a pandemic drama that was co-produced between Spectrum Originals and CBS Studios. She first appeared on the show in the role of U.S. attorney Liz Lawrence in 2009 on CBS's medical drama The Good Wife in 2018 McDonald took on the part (now known as Liz Reddick) as a season-long regular on The Good Fight on Paramount+ getting three Critics Choice Award nominations for her role. She currently guest-stars in Julian Fellowes's historical drama The Gilded Age on HBO.