Viola Davis

Oscar-winning actor hits back at the negative response to her performance as Michelle Obama in drama series The First Lady.

Not everything is going to be an awards-worthy performance.” She also referred to criticism as “an occupational hazard”. “But you have to. Somehow that you’re living a life that you’re surrounded by people who lie to you and ‘I’m going to be the person that leans in and tells you the truth’. So it gives them an opportunity to be cruel to you.”

Oscar-winning actress Viola, 56, stars as the former first lady in Showtime's The First Lady, which premiered April 17. Critics have not been kind about the ...

And I did push for those words to be used because I know that those are the words that Black people use in private. We use those words in private, especially to drive something home, and Michelle Obama is from the South Side of Chicago. And so what I wanted to do was honor her and not the perception of what Black women are supposed to be.' Listen, I am sort of an angry person, but she’s not. I'm not sending her nothing' 'How do you move on from the hurt, from failure? I'm not sending her nothing.' That makes it seem like a whole joke film...' wrote one user. How will you ever face Michelle Obama after this?' commented a third 'They know what she sounds like, they know what she looks like. So it gives them an opportunity to be cruel to you.' 'They always feel like they're telling you something that you don't know,' she said.

Oscar winner was accused of doing 'duck face' in Showtime series.

Not everything is going to be an awards-worthy performance.” Speaking to BBC News, she acknowledged that criticism is an “occupational hazard” for actors, saying: “How do you move on from the hurt, from failure? One viewer called her depiction “unnecessary and borderline insulting”.

The Oscar winner has responded to the negative reviews she's received for her portrayal of Michelle Obama in 'The First Lady': “Not everything is going to ...

She’s won an Academy Award and a Tony Award for playing Rose in August Wilson’s Fences, another Tony for King Hedley II, and an Emmy for How to Get Away With Murder. Still, Davis maintains that not every project of hers is designed to garner acclaim or accolades. Davis went viral after the show premiered, provoking a series of negative tweets about her portrayal of Obama—many of which centered on her frequently pursed lips and “distracting” facial expressions. “And I’m not saying that to be nasty either.”

Viola Davis responded to criticism of her portrayal of Michelle Obama in Showtime's "The First Lady."

“Viola davis is so talented, vibrant, and respected," another person tweeted. Somehow that you’re living a life that you’re surrounded by people who lie to you and ‘I’m going to be the person that leans in and tells you the truth.' So it gives them an opportunity to be cruel to you. And I’m not saying that to be nasty either,” she said. It’s distracting and unnecessary.” “Where she got the idea to do the weird, exaggerated pursed lip thing is beyond me. She also said she knows criticism is an “occupational hazard” and added that you “have to” move on from the pain of being critiqued.

Viola Davis, seen in 2017 at the Academy Awards after winning an Oscar, is fed up with critics of her performance in “The First Lady.” (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles ...

The show premiered on Showtime April 17. “They always feel like they’re telling you something that you don’t know,” the “Suicide Squad” actor said. Obama has yet to post on social media about her opinion of Davis’ performance or about “The First Lady” in general.

Viola Davis was all smiles as she heard a sweet message from her old drama teacher, who was one of the first people to call her 'beautiful.'

I send love.’ ‘And I remember it shocked me! Viola Davis was all smiles as she heard a heart-warming message from her old drama teacher, who she remembered as one of the first people to call her ‘beautiful‘.

The 56-year-old Oscar-, Emmy- and Tony-winning actor is the first Black woman to win that awards triple crown, so it's no surprise her name frequently appears ...

“George was and is the nicest human being,” Davis writes. I was that nervous, terrified,” Davis writes. When she and her husband flew into Milan, Clooney sent a car to pick them up for one of the most magical vacations of her life, dining on gourmet meals while overlooking Lake Como. “Everyone was geared toward molding and shaping you into a perfect white actor.” “It was like a hand reached for mine and I finally saw my way out.” “When you are a dark-skin girl, no one simply adores you.” “The weight of generational trauma and having to fight for your basic needs doesn’t leave room for anything else. She writes of one memorable encounter when her father took her to a woman's apartment and she opened the door naked. Of one such early incident, Davis writes, “Then he just swung his hand and smashed the glass on the side of my mom’s head and I saw the glass slice the upper side of her face near her eye and blood just squirted out. Davis writes, “There I was, a working actress with steady gigs, Broadway credits, multiple industry awards, and a reputation of bringing professionalism and excellence to any project. Davis was born the fifth of six children on a plantation in St. Matthews, South Carolina, into deep, dysfunctional poverty. In the beginning, she recalls how in the third grade “eight or nine white boys in my class made it their daily, end-of-school ritual to chase me like dogs hunting prey.” They would throw things – pine cones, rocks, even bricks – and call her names and racial slurs.

Viola Davis's memoir, "Finding Me," is no Hollywood tell-all.

By the time Davis gets to her stay at George Clooney’s Italian villa, the cartoonishly lavish experience reads not as an out-of-touch fantasy but a well-earned respite for someone whose road to prosperity was paved with pitfalls. She also cites the roadblocks she navigated because of her weight and skin tone, noting that “almost every role I auditioned for were drug-addicted mothers.” It’s infuriating, and sadly unsurprising. “It was a beautiful scene of hurt, pain, longing, love,” she writes. So are the descriptions of her dilapidated homes, including one rat-infested apartment she bluntly refers to as a “death trap.” Pet lovers may have a tough time enduring detailed descriptions of cruelty to animals that Davis recalls witnessing. “It also has the power to heal the broken. Davis acknowledges that she eventually became an actress as a coping mechanism of sorts.

Not many actors have won an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony Award, but Viola Davis has been honoured with all the major accolades. All the more extraordinary when ...

To read Davis' memoir is to understand just how hard this spectacular performer has worked to build the career and life she has today.

As a culture, we’re now racing to correct our past shortsightedness, to spot and celebrate the talents of performers who are Black, without first relegating them to that convenient folder labeled “Black performers.” Davis writes of her exasperation at how, even now, there are still so few leading roles for Black women. In the early 2000s, around the time of Solaris and Antwone Fisher—in other words, as Davis was starting to garner acclaim but wasn’t yet famous—a film writer I know pitched a story on her to the New York Times. To hear my friend tell it, the editor sighed and said that quite a few other writers had pitched the same story, but that she didn’t yet feel Davis was “big” enough to warrant even a small profile. Her prose is forthright and supple and often delightful, as when she describes one of the first acting coaches who really saw something in her as a teenager, a teacher in the federally funded Upward Bound program. He put a sheet of plastic in its place so you wouldn’t fall out or get wet from the rain.” Stetson and the other instructors in the program changed Davis’ life: “They blew a hole in my world and opened up a new space that I could occupy.” Davis devotes a few paragraphs here and there to her health battles with alopecia and fibroid tumors, but she seems to prefer to talk about joy—particularly her courtship with and subsequent marriage to fellow actor Julius Tennon, whom she met on the set of Steven Bochco’s City of Angels in the early 2000s. “I never saw anyone on network TV who looked like me playing a role like this.” And yet suddenly, Davis was playing that role, kicking away her own ingrained insecurities to do so. (She won her first in 2001, for Wilson’s King Headley II, and her second in 2010, for her performance as Rose Lee Maxson in Wilson’s Fences, the same role that would earn her an Oscar in the film version six years later). The bullying at the hands of her schoolmates, already a constant, only intensified; the minute classes ended, the boys at her school, nearly all of them white, would chase her “like dogs hunting prey.” Of that bullying, Davis writes, “This was one more piece of trauma I was experiencing—my clothes, my hair, my hunger, too—and my home life being the big daddy of them all. To read Davis’ elegantly written but sometimes harrowing memoir, Finding Me, is to understand just how hard this spectacular performer has worked to build the career and life she has today—and to acknowledge that even for a performer as outrageously gifted and dedicated as Davis is, the ingredient X known as luck can never be underestimated. Davis also won an Emmy in 2014, for her starring role as Annalise Keating in How to Get Away with Murder, and the section of Finding Me in which she explains how hard she worked to vest that character with depth and dimension may be the best link between that smart, stubborn, anxious child and the Davis we know today, an uncompromising performer who weaves threads of undeniable truth into everything she does. Even in the early 2000s, as she was just beginning to shape her career, Davis was so astonishingly, subtly multidimensional—as the somber, clear-eyed Dr. Gordon in Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris, or as a long-absent mother in Washington’s Antwone Fisher, devastating in a nearly wordless scene—that she took a kind of ownership of the films around her, staking her own territory even if you couldn’t immediately match her face to her name. She was great before she won an Oscar (for her supporting role in Denzel Washington’s 2016 film version of August Wilson’s Fences), and even before her earlier nominations (for John Patrick Shanley’s 2008 Doubt and Tate Taylor’s 2011 The Help). In other words, she was great before legions of film critics and moviegoers finally began making the “water is wet” observation that Black actresses weren’t getting the film roles, or the acclaim, they deserved—and if television was ahead of the curve on that one, it wasn’t by much.

"Not everything is going to be an awards-worthy performance."

Not everything is going to be an awards-worthy performance.” Said choices have previously paid off for Viola, who is one of the few performers – and the only Black woman – to have won an Oscar, Emmy and Tony award for acting, putting her within reach of the coveted EGOT status. “They always feel like they’re telling you something that you don’t know,” she went on.

Viola Davis shared about the shame she experienced growing up as a result of poverty, violence and bullying, which she details in her memoir "Finding Me."

"That's what all of them did." "Sometimes, someone is just there long enough to carry you from one tiny experience to the next." "What I felt was a complete absence of love," she added. "I'll tell you who defines it, the boys who are throwing the bricks. Who tells you how you're supposed to feel joy and find yourself and find peace and find all of that? On Tuesday, the Tony and Oscar award-winning actress told "The View" about growing up in Central Falls, Rhode Island, which was a predominantly white neighborhood when she was a child.

Her alcoholic father routinely beat and bloodied her mother, and young Viola and her five siblings lived in a rat-filled house with little to eat. Daniel says “ ...

“Finding Me” is raw in its anger, shocking in its frankness, often downright vulgar — and wonderfully alive with Davis’ passion poured into every page. Viola and her five siblings lived in a rat-filled house that lacked dependable heat and plumbing. The introvert made a place for herself in school theater. Yet her self image as a fleeing 8-year-old — ugly, stupid and unwanted because she was told so — never left. Award-winning actor Viola Davis looks back on her fraught childhood in a new memoir titled “Finding Me.” In a review for The Associated Press, Douglass K. Daniel says Davis recalls her upbringing in poverty like the victim of a disaster still dazed by the experience but remembering every terrible moment. Daniel says “Finding Me” is raw in its anger and shocking in its frankness.

Viola Davis has said she believes "critics absolutely serve no purpose" after negative reviews for playing Michelle Obama in 'The First Lady'

“How do you move on from the hurt, from failure?” Davis added of bad reviews. “Critics absolutely serve no purpose,” Davis said in an interview with the BBC. “And I’m not saying that to be nasty, either. “Inclusivity cannot be a hashtag.

Viola Davis is unfazed after defending her performance in "The First Lady," Chris Rock remains as cool as a cucumber and more...