Audra Mc Donald

Audra is a singular artist with regard to the scope and range of her skills as a performer and song writer. Audra McDonald, winner of Six Tony Awards in a row and two Grammy Awards in 2015 was listed as one of the Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People. The president Barack Obama also awarded her the National Medal of Arts -the highest honor in America for achievements in this field. She is equally at home on television, film and Broadway. The luminous tone of her voice makes her a natural on the stage. Apart from performing in theater she also enjoys a thriving career as an internationally acclaimed musician and recording artist. McDonald is from Fresno California, where she was surrounded by a large family full of musicians. In the Juilliard School in New York City, McDonald received training as the classical singer. In 1994, just a few years after she graduated from Juilliard School, she won the Tony Award for "Best Performance by a Leading Actress in the Musical" for Carousel. Over the next four years she was awarded two additional Tony Awards for the category of 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 amount of three Tony Awards by the time she reached the age of 30. In 2004 she was nominated for her fourth Tony Award for her performance in A Raisin in the Sun alongside Sean Diddy Combs. And in 2012, her 5th Tony and first in the Leading Actress category was won for her performance as the titular character in The Gershwins Porgy and Bess. The year 2014 saw her make Broadway history and became an official Tony Awards most decorated performer when she won the sixth Tony Award in the role of Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill the role which also served as a basis for her Olivier Award nominated debut performance on London's West End. Along with setting the record in the contest in which she won the most Tony Awards by acting, she became the first woman to be awarded each of the four categories for acting. Other credits in the theater include The Secret Garden (1993) Marie Christine (1999) Henry IV (2004) 110 in the Shade (2007) Twelfth Night (2009) that marked the release of her Public Theater Shakespeare in the Park debut, the 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 was introduced to the public via television for her dramatic performance in Peabody Award winning CBS's Having Our Say the Delany Sisters first 100 years. Her next role was that of a character actor on NBC's Law & Order Special Victims Unit where she appeared with Kathy Bates and Victor Garber. McDonald, who received an Emmy Award nomination back in 1999 for her work as a character in an HBO adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning film Wit directed and starring Emma Thompson, made her return with the company in 2003 to star in the drama on politics Mister Sterling. The film was written and produced by Emmy Award-winning Lawrence O'Donnell Jr. Early in 2006, she joined WB's The Bedford Diaries. The next year, she appeared as a recurring actor on NBC's Kidnapped. McDonald received a nomination for a fourth Emmy in the year 2016 for her performance in HBO's production of Lady Day, at Emerson's Bar & Grill. She also appeared in 2021 when she starred alongside Taylor Schilling and Steven Pasquale in the film The Bite, a pandemic film produced by Spectrum Originals and CBS Studios. McDonald was first seen in The Good Wife, a CBS legal drama The Good Wife as U.S. attorneys Liz Lawrence and Liz Reddick from 2009 to 2018 reprised the characters (now called Liz Reddick) in The Good Fight in the role of an Paramount+ season regular. McDonald received nominations in the three Critics Choice Award awards. She is currently appearing as a guest on Julian Fellowes' historical drama The Gilded Age, which premieres on HBO.