Another one for the trophy case! Viola Davis became an EGOT winner on Sunday, February 5, when she earned a Grammy Award for narrating the audiobook of her memoir, Finding Me.
“It has just been such a journey,” the Woman King actress, 57, said while accepting the award for Best Audio Book, Narration, and Storytelling Recording. “I just EGOT!”
The How to Get Away With Murder alum added that she penned the book — which hit shelves in April 2022 — for her younger self. “I wrote this book to honor the 6-year-old Viola, to honor her, to honor her life, her joy, her trauma, her everything,” she said during the pre-telecast portion of the ceremony.
Davis won her first Tony Award in 2001 for her performance in August Wilson’s King Hedley II. She took home her second Tony in 2010 for her work in Fences, also by Wilson. Her Emmy win came in 2015 when she picked up the honor for How to Get Away With Murder. In 2017, the Doubt star won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in the film adaptation of Fences costarring and directed by Denzel Washington.
Earlier this year, Davis opened up about how she would feel about becoming an EGOT winner with her first Grammy nomination. “I absolutely, definitely think about it as a huge accomplishment,” she explained in an interview with Grammy.com in January. “I feel this way, even though it’s probably a very dramatic statement on my part: I think that everybody wants their life to mean something. I believe in the Cherokee birth blessing, which is, ‘May you live long enough to know why you were born.’ I do believe that you literally wanna blow a hole through this world in whatever way you can.”
She added: “A lot of people don’t know how to do that. A lot of people haven’t found that thing that they’re passionate about, that they can do. Some have. But we all are looking for that, blowing a hole through this earth before we leave it. I think about that in my work a lot. I really found that thing that I love to do. So I always wanna make it meaningful.”
The Widows star is only the third Black woman in history to achieve EGOT status. The other two are Whoopi Goldberg, who hit the milestone in 2002, and Jennifer Hudson, who completed hers last year.
Before Davis won her Grammy, Hudson, 41, was the most recent celebrity to earn the coveted achievement. The American Idol alum won an Oscar in 2007 for her performance in Dreamgirls, a Grammy in 2009 for her self-titled debut album and a Daytime Emmy in 2021 for executive producing the animated film Baba Yaga. She completed her EGOT in June 2022 when she won a Tony Award for producing the Broadway musical A Strange Loop.
