DREAMS DO COME TRUE
IT TOOK SOME TIME, BUT VIOLA DAVIS HAS FINALLY GOT HOLLYWOOD AT HER FEET
When Viola Davis was a girl, she dreamed of money. Not vast riches, but loose change — the kind that would make daily life that bit more manageable.
“The big thing for me was quarters,” she remembers, talking from the Los Angeles home she shares with her husband, the actor and producer Julius Tennon, and Genesis, their 10-year-old daughter. “I would have dreams about finding quarters. And in these dreams I would grab as many as I could find, so I could buy some food the next day. I’d wake with my hands clutched tight, absolutely believing that those quarters would still be inside and, of course, they never were.”
Davis, 55, is one of the great screen actresses of her generation but her hard-won success, she says, still feels a little like a dream from which she might wake. She grew up in poverty in Rhode Island, the fifth of six children: her father was a horse trainer; her mother, a factory worker, maid and civil rights campaigner. The family was so poor, her mother would fasten her braids for school with the plastic clips from bags of sliced bread.
She was inspired to act after she saw the pioneering Black American actress Cicely Tyson in a TV movie when she was eight years old. Four decades later, Tyson was cast as Davis’s mother in the legal series How to Get Away with Murder. It was, says Davis, as if she’d awoken, unclasped her fingers, and found the coins she’d dreamed of were somehow still there. We’re speaking a few days after Tyson’s death at the age of 96; Davis talks about her quietly, referring to her always as “Miss Tyson,” and credits her with helping set her life on its course.
“In her I saw myself,” she says, “a respectable choice of profession, and a way out of my life.”
Respectable, however, is not the first word that springs to mind when considering Davis’s latest role. In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, a Netflix adaptation of the 1982 August Wilson play, directed by George C. Wolfe, she plays the titular grande-dame of the blues: — plus-sized, rich-voiced, garishly made up and sexually zealous. The film unfolds during a fraught and sweaty recording session in 1927 Chicago, during which Ma clashes with — well, just about everyone, but most notably the white record executive who sees her as a meal ticket, and also her ambitious young trumpeter, blazingly embodied by the late Chadwick Boseman, who’s plotting his own future in the business.
Davis has been nominated for a Golden Globe and longlisted for a BAFTA for the role, and an Oscar nod next month (March 15) seems assured. She first saw the play while working as an usher at her local theatre — a job she took to pay her way through theatre school, first at Rhode Island College then at the prestigious Juilliard in New York. She remembers she “almost stopped breathing. Because it was like I was watching a famous singer that I loved in private, even though I didn’t even know who Ma Rainey was at all.”
At Juilliard, she didn’t perform any of Wilson’s
plays, largely because there weren’t enough Black students in her year to cast one. “I can’t say that I’m not appreciative of my training there, but I did not find a sense of belonging,” she says. “It was a place that taught
classical, Eurocentric theatre as if it was the Bible — and for me, as a chocolate, kinkyhaired girl, there was no way in. To perform in Shakespeare or George Bernard Shaw or Eugene O’neill, I felt like what was required of me was to make any hint of my Blackness disappear, that it would somehow be a good thing if the audience could forget I was Black.”
Things changed when she arrived on Broadway in the early 2000s, and she won her first Tony award for her role in King Hedley II, the ninth play in Wilson’s 10-strong Pittsburgh Cycle. (Ma Rainey is the second.) Yet when researching Ma years later, she could find only stray biographical snippets of
the singer, born Gertrude Pridgett, in books about the blues, while appearance-wise, there were just seven photographs to go on. Some of what she found “was hard to read.” Bessie Smith, another notable blues singer, who toured with Rainey early in her career, “said that she was ugly, with her grease paint and mouthful of gold teeth. But you have to play a person as they are, and find the beauty in that.”
Davis was especially keen to defy the cliché of “the obligatory big, fat, Black woman” — not least because she suspected audiences might embrace it all too readily. “In the past, I’ve felt that no one really cares if you play a Black woman specifically,”
she says. “They just want to be able to experience her, rather than know her. So if I’d made Ma simply big, fat and funny, or big, fat and mean, many people would have been absolutely OK with that.”
This crystallized for Davis after the 2011 release of The Help, a 1960s-set period piece in which she played a put-upon Mississippi maid.
The film was a considerable hit, and earned Davis her second Oscar nomination (after Doubt three years earlier). But she later realized her character felt more like a white person’s idealized notion of a stoic, longsuffering Black woman in the segregated south.