Audra Mc Donald

Audra McDonald is unparalleled in the range and variety of her artistry as both a singer and an actor. She has been a six-time record winner of the Tony Awards, two Grammy Awards as well as one Emmy Award she received in the year 2015 by Barack Obama. She is equally at home in television, film and Broadway. Her luminous soprano will make her an ideal performer on the stage. In addition to her theatre work, she has been a busy singer and a concert artist. She regularly performs in some of the top venues around the world. McDonald is from Fresno California, where she was raised by a family full of musicians. At the Juilliard School in New York City, McDonald received training as the classical singer. Following her graduation, she won the first Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in the Musical Carousel at the Lincoln Center Theater (1994). In the subsequent four years she won another two Tony Awards under the featured actress category. They were awarded in recognition of her Broadway productions of Terrence McGally's productions Master Class and Ragtime. The year 2004, she won the fourth Tony for her role in the musical that she portrayed alongside Sean Diddy Combs in A Raisin in the Sun. Then in 2012, when she was a lead actress for the role of Porgy and Bess in The Gershwins Porgy and Bess she received five Tony and also won her first award in the leading actor category. The actress made Broadway history in 2014 as she became the highest famous Tony Award winner. Her portrayal in the role of Billie Holiday at Emerson's Bar & Grill in the show, which was also the catalyst for the career of her Olivier Award nominated debut on London's West End in 2017, earned her six Tony Awards. Aside from setting a record to win the most awards for actor, she was the first person to win each of the four categories for acting. Other credits in the theater are The Secret Garden (1993) Marie Christine (1999) Henry IV (2004) 110 in the Shade (2007) Twelfth Night (2009) which marked 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). The Peabody Award-winning CBS show Having Our Say The Delany Sisters First 100 Years that was the first to introduce McDonald to television audiences for her performance as a dramatic actor. McDonald was later cast as a co-star with Kathy Bates and Victor Garber in the critically acclaimed 1999 television adaptation of Annie and in 2000 she played a regular role on NBC's hit series Law & Order Special Victims Unit. McDonald's debut Emmy was for the HBO movie version of Pulitzer Prize-winning Wit. Produced by Mike Nichols with Emma Thompson as the main character the actress was back on network television in 2003. The show she starred in was Mister Sterling and produced by Emmy Award Winner Lawrence O'Donnell Jr. Beginning in 2006, she was part of the crew of WB's The Bedford Diaries and over the next season she had the role of a regular on NBC's television series Kidnapped. McDonald earned a nomination for a Fourth Emmy in 2016 for her part in HBO's production called Lady Day, at Emerson's Bar and Grill. The actress starred with Taylor Schilling and Steven Pasquale in The Bite a six-episode pandemic-themed drama produced through Spectrum Originals and CBS Studios in 2021. McDonald first played U.S. lawyer Liz Lawrence (now Liz Reddick), in CBS's legal drama The Good Wife, in 2009. In the year 2018, she returned to her role on The Good Fight for Paramount+ as a series regular. Her performance received three Critics Choice Award Nominations. The actress is currently acting as a guest in Julian Fellowes' historical drama The Gilded Age, which premieres on HBO.