Audra Mc Donald

Audra McDonald's talents are unrivaled in her range of talents and diversity as a vocalist, and performer. She was the recipient of record-breaking seven Tony Awards two Grammy Awards as well as an Emmy Award in 2015 she was named as one of the 100 most influential people in Time magazine. individuals and was awarded the National Medal of Arts--America's most prestigious award for excellence in the field--from President Barack Obama. She is equally at home in film, television and Broadway. The enthralling soprano of her voice can make her appear effortless on the stage. Alongside her stage performances, she also has many facets of her career, including singer and concert performer. She regularly performs in the finest venues of the world. McDonald was born into a musically inclined family in California, Fresno. She received classical vocal training from the Juilliard School of New York. A year after graduating she was awarded her first Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured actress in an Musical for Carousel at the Lincoln Center Theater (1994). The next four years she won two additional Tony Awards in the featured actress category for her performances in both the Broadway productions Terrence McNally's play Master Class (1996) and the Musical Ragtime (1998) making the record-breaking total of three Tony Awards before the age of 30. The actress won her fourth Tony in 2004 when she starred alongside Sean Diddy Combs in A Raisin in the Sun as well as in 2012. In 2012, she won five Tonys and her first time in the category of leading actress, for her part as Porgy and Bess in The Gershwins Porgy and Bess in the lead role. In 2014 she made Broadway history, becoming one of the Tony Awards most decorated performer after she received her sixth award in the role of Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill the role which also served as the basis for her Olivier Award-nominated debut on London's West End. Also, she broke the record for most prizes won by an actor. Her other credits for theater are 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 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 acting on television was in the Peabody Award-winning CBS show Having Our Say, The Delany Sisters' First 100 years. The actress then starred alongside Kathy Bates and Victor Garber in the highly acclaimed 1999 television adaptation of Annie and then in 2000 she played a regular role on NBC's popular series Law & Order Special Victims Unit. McDonald earned her first Emmy for her part of"The Wit," the HBO version of the Pulitzer Prize winning play Wit directed by Mike Nichols, starring Emma Thompson. In 2003 she was back on television, this time in Mister Sterling produced by Emmy award-winner Lawrence O'Donnell Jr., starring Josh Brolin. At the beginning of 2006, McDonald joined WB's The Bedford Diaries. The following year, she became in a regular role on NBC's Kidnapped. In the year 2016 McDonald was nominated to win a fourth Emmy Award for her performance in HBO's Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, which was a film special. She was a part of Taylor Schilling and Steven Pasquale in The Bite a six-episode pandemic-themed drama produced with Spectrum Originals and CBS Studios in 2021. McDonald first played U.S. lawyer Liz Lawrence (now Liz Reddick), in the CBS Legal thriller The Good Wife, in 2009. In 2018, she returned to the role on The Good Fight for Paramount+ as a series regular. Her performance received three Critics Choice Award Nominations. She guest stars in Julian Fellowes's historical drama The Gilded Age.