Audra Mc Donald

Audra Mcdonald is unique in the range of her talents and her versatility as an actor and singer. She was the recipient of record-breaking six Tony Awards as well as two Grammy Awards and Emmy Awards. She was also named as a result of Time magazine among the 100 most influential people and was given with the National Medal of Arts - the most prestigious honor in America in recognition of artistic excellence and achievement - by the president Barack Obama. A luminous singer with an unmatched gift of emotional truth-telling Ms. O'Connor has a natural on Broadway in addition to the stage of opera and on television. In addition to her work in the theatre, she has a thriving career as a recording and concert artist who performs regularly at most prestigious venues in the world. McDonald was raised in a musically inclined family from Fresno in California. She underwent classical vocal training from The Juilliard School of New York. She was awarded her initial Tony Award in 1994 for the best performance of an Actress in a musical called Carousel in the Lincoln Center Theater. Over the next four years she was awarded two additional Tony Awards for the category of featured actress. She was in Broadway premieres Terrence McNally's musical Ragtime and Terrence McNally's play Master Class in 1996. The result was an astonishing total of three Tony Awards by the time she turned 30. In 2004, she took home her fourth Tony acting alongside Sean Diddy Combs in A Raisin in the Sun and in 2012, she took home her fifth--and her first in the leading actress category in the role of her lead in The Gershwins Porgy and Bess. She made Broadway history when she became the world's most decorated Tony Award performer. The role she played as Billie Holiday at Emerson's Bar & Grill in the show, which also served to launch the career of her Olivier Award nominated debut on London's West End in 2017, earned her six Tony Awards. Along with setting the record in the contest to win the most awards by an acting, she became the first person to win all four acting categories. Her other credits for theater includes The Secret Garden (1993) Marie Christine (1999) Henry IV (2004) 110 in the Shade (2007) Twelfth Night (2009) that marked 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 TV actor was with the Peabody Award-winning CBS series Having Our Say The Delany Sistersthe Early 100 Years. McDonald was later cast as a co-star alongside Kathy Bates and Victor Garber in the critically acclaimed 1999 Disney/ABC television remake of Annie and in 2000 she had a recurring role on the NBC's hit show Law & Order Special Victims Unit. Following the first Emmy award for her performance on the HBO film adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize winning play Wit directed by Mike Nichols and starring Emma Thompson McDonald returned to network television in 2003 in the drama about politics Mister Sterling, produced by Emmy Award winner Lawrence O'Donnell Jr. and with Josh Brolin. In 2006, McDonald joined the WB's The Bedford Diaries. The next year she was an actor who appeared on NBC's Kidnapped. In 2016, McDonald was nominated for an additional Emmy Award for her performance as a character in HBO's Lady Day at Emerson's Bar Restaurant & Grill, a movie-special. She starred alongside Taylor Schilling and Steven Pasquale in The Bite a six-episode pandemic-themed drama co-produced by Spectrum Originals and CBS Studios in 2021. The actress first appeared as U.S. attorney Liz Lawrence in the year 2009 on CBS's legal comedy The Good Wife in 2018 McDonald returned to the character (now called Liz Reddick) as a season regular of The Good Fight on Paramount+ with three Critics Choice Award nominations for her performance. In the present, she is an actor in Julian Fellowes' historical film The Gilded Age.