Audra Mc Donald

Audra Mcdonald is a standout in her breadth of talent and versatility as an actor and singer. Audra McDonald who has won six Tony Awards in a row and two Grammy Awards in 2015 was recognized as one of Times magazine's 100 most influential people. President Barack Obama also awarded her the National Medal of Arts -- America's highest honour for achievements in this field. She has a voice of unparalleled elegance and an aptitude to tell the truth in a dramatic way, her roles in Broadway or in the opera have the same aplomb as the roles in movies as well as on TV. She is a renowned performer in concert and recording and regularly performs at some of the most prestigious performances around the world. McDonald was born into a musically inclined family from Fresno in California. She received classical vocal training at her school, the Juilliard School of New York. One year after graduation McDonald was awarded her Tony Award Best Performance for an Actress in Musical Lead at Carousel for Lincoln Center Theater. Over the next four years, she took home two more Tony Awards for the category of a featured actress. She was in the Broadway premier productions of Terrence McNally's musical Ragtime and Terrence McNally's show Master Class in 1996. The result was an astonishing number of Tony Awards by the time she was thirty. The year 2004, she won her fourth Tony for the role she played alongside Sean Diddy Combs in A Raisin in the Sun. Then in 2012, when she was the lead actor for the role of Porgy and Bess in The Gershwins Porgy and Bess she received the fifth Tony and also won her first Tony Award in the best actor 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. This is the same role she played for her 2017 West End London debut for which she was nominated for an Olivier Award. As the first actress to be awarded in four different acting categories, McDonald set a record for the total number of awards that an actor has been awarded. Her other credits for theater include 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 show, Shuffle Along or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921, and all That Followed (2016) Frankie and Johnny in Clair de Lune (2019) as well as Ohio State Murders (2023). McDonald first made her television debut as a drama actor in the Peabody Award winner CBS series Having Our Say - The Delany Sisters' First 100 years. Her next appearance was as a recurring actor on the NBC show Law & Order Special Victims Unit where she starred alongside Kathy Bates and Victor Garber. McDonald won the first Emmy for her performance in 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-winning Lawrence O'Donnell Jr., with Josh Brolin. Then, in the beginning of 2006, she joined The Bedford Diaries' cast on show on WB called The Bedford Diaries and over the following season, she played an recurring role in the NBC television show Kidnapped. McDonald received a nomination for a Fourth Emmy in the year 2016 for her performance in HBO's film of Lady Day, at Emerson's Bar and Grill. The Bite was a six episode drama about pandemics produced in collaboration with Spectrum Originals in collaboration with CBS Studios. McDonald appeared as U.S. prosecutor Liz Lawrence, a character she first played in the CBS drama The Good Wife legal drama in the year 2009. The role was reprised in 2018as the an episode main character Liz Reddick in Paramount+'s The Good Fight. As a result of the role she played, McDonald received three Critics Choice Award nominated. The actress is a featured character on HBO's The Gilded Age by Julian Fellowes.