Crush of the week: Viola Davis

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jan/31/viola-davis-crush-of-the-week-bim-adewunmi

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Three cheers for Viola Davis, who last weekend won a Screen Actors Guild award for her role in How To Get Away With Murder. She’s only the third actor of colour to have won Female Actor in a Drama Series (the other two came from shows also produced by Shonda Rhimes), and her pleasure in triumph warmed me from the inside out. “Thank you,” she said to the producing team, “for thinking that a sexualised, messy, mysterious woman could be a 49-year-old, dark-skinned African American woman who looks like me.” In calling out Hollywood’s problem with black actors and the limited roles they’re offered, she gave a speech that was much more than the sum of its parts.

This is Davis’s moment in the sun, and how welcome it must feel. She’s had a long career, with plenty of blink-and-you’ll-miss-her roles. There she is as a stern police officer in Kate & Leopold! And as the best friend in Eat Pray Love! She was in a series of Soderbergh movies, always stuck on the edge of the main action. And so it continued until 2011, when she was nominated for an Oscar for her role as a maid in The Help.

But here’s the best part: you want to watch Davis. She has a great voice – smooth, warm and rich – and imbues all her characters with intelligence and vulnerability. She has presence, in other words. And it’s worth mentioning her appearance, because it’s been remarked upon before (by a critic who described her as “less classically beautiful” than the lighter-skinned Kerry Washington). News flash: not that it matters, but Davis is gorgeous – and her success only makes her more so.

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