![]() Davis opens the book with a telling scene from her childhood, an upbringing marked by trauma that would take years for her to process. 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. 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. 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. 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. ![]() ![]() 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). Viola Davis has always been a great actress. ![]()
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