Viola Davis' Grammys Win Places Her in Historic EGOT Company

By Daniel S. Levine

Viola Davis is the latest member of the EGOT club. On Sunday, she finally added a Grammy to her awards collection after winning Best Audio Book, Narration & Storytelling Recording at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards. She recorded the audiobook for her memoir, Finding Me.

Davis, 57, already won the Emmy, Oscar, and Tony awards she needed for the EGOT status. She won her first Tony Award in 2001 for Best Featured Actress in a Play for King Hedley II. She won her second Tony in 2010 for Best Actress in a Play for Fences. Her Emmy victory came in 2015 for her lead role in ABC's How to Get Away With Murder. In 2017, she won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for Denzel Washington's film adaptation of Fences.

"It has just been such a journey," Davis said when she accepted her Grammy, which was presented during the pre-ceremony awards, notes NBC News. "I Just EGOT!" She went on to say that she wrote Finding Me "to honor the 6-year-old Viola, to honor her, to honor her life, her joy, her trauma, her everything."

This was Davis' first Grammy nomination. In January, she told the Grammys website it would be a "huge accomplishment" if she joined the EGOT club. "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," Davis said. "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."

"A lot of people don't know how to do that," Davis continued. "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."

Davis is only the 17th member of the EGOT club. Before Davis, the most recent member was singer Jennifer Hudson. She joined after winning a Tony in 2022 as a producer on the Best Musical winner A Strange Loop. She also has a Daytime Emmy for the VR experience Baba Yaga, an Oscar for Dreamgirls, and two Grammys. Other recent new members of the EGOT club include composers Alan Menken, Robert Lopez, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Tim Rice, and singer John Legend. Davis, Hudson, and Whoopi Goldberg are the only Black female members of the club.

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