Grammys 2023: Actress Viola Davis becomes EGOT winner

Add another honor to Viola Davis’ long list of awards.

On Sunday, the acclaimed actress became the 18th EGOT winner when she received a Grammy Award in the Audiobook, Narration and Storytelling category. Davis was nominated for narrating the audio versions of her 2022 memoir Finding Me.

EGOT status, last achieved by Jennifer Hudson in 2021, indicates that an individual has won at least one of the “Big Four”: Emmy (television), Grammy (recording arts), Oscar (film), and Tony (stage). . Sunday’s Grammy sealed the deal for the actor-producer of The Woman King.

The 57-year-old actress won her Emmy for the first of five times when she was nominated for Lead Actress on the drama series How to Get Away With Murder in 2015. The four-time Oscar nominee won the 2017 Oscar for Supporting Actress for Fences. The Tony for Best Actress in a Play came years earlier, in 2010, for playwright August Wilson’s stage version of “Fences.”

Davis was up for Sunday’s Grammy against fellow nominees Jamie Foxx (“Act Like You Got Some Sense”), Mel Brooks (“All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business by Mel Brooks”), Lin-Manuel Miranda ( “Aristotle and Dante Dive Into the Waters of the World”) and Questlove (“Music Is History”).

Besides Hudson, the other EGOT winners are – in reverse chronological order – Alan Mencken, John Legend, Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Robert Lopez, Scott Rudin, Whoopi Goldberg, Mike Nichols, Mel Brooks, Jonathan Tunick, Marvin Hamlisch, Audrey Hepburn , John Gielgud, Rita Moreno, Helen Hayes and Richard Rodgers.

Other entertainers – including Barbra Streisand and Harry Belafonte – have won all four awards, but at least one of them was in a non-competitive category (e.g. special or honorary award).

Legend was the youngest person to receive all four awards (at age 39); Gielgud (who did it at 87) was the eldest.

Later in 2023, Davis will appear in the films The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (as Dr. Volumnia Gaul) and Air, in which she plays Michael Jordan’s mother, Deloris.