VIOLA DAVIS - 2011 Academy Award Nominee Actress in a Leading Role: THE HELP credit: © Douglas Kirkland 2012
It has taken Viola Davis 20 years with awards and accomplishments from Broadway and Hollywood to become an overnight sensation with her Oscar®-nominated performance in The Help.
Entertainment Heartbeat asked Davis if handling her fame today is easier than when she was a young star on the New York theater.
“When I was 28 years old,” Davis says in a friendly calm that makes it hard to imagine her any other way than confident. “I remember I was on Broadway, and I just thought I could handle that success and I lost my hair. I lost my hair because I was stressed-out, because I think I read a bad review, so literally, this whole side of my head, a friend of mine said ‘It’s so clean, Viola, it’s like a baby’s behind it’s so clean.'” Davis agonizes over the memory, then holds back a laugh from the person she was 18 years back. “And then I had a big bald spot on top of my head, and then it kept growing, and growing and I later found out it was due to stress…I could not handle stress at all at that age, I was so self conscious, so wanting to please everyone, and now at 46, I mean I just let so much of that go, you know, you just start to connect the dots and realize that at the end of the day you have to define joy and happiness for yourself and I’m so glad all of the scrutiny and the exposure is happening now at halfway done with my life, because I’m wiser. And…I’ve got my hair!”
Davis tells us that coming from the theater she was always trying to please her drama teachers and stage directors where they were obsessed with character minutia, “where your character had to be right, had to be dead-on.” But as Davis was immersed in the whirlwind interviews for The Help she discovered something else.
“Doing all this publicity for this movie I just found my voice…when I started getting all this scrutiny for playing a maid in the deep south who had a broken dialect I was taken aback at first, but in the course of having to defend my choices I really found my voice, which really parallels Aibileen’s (Davis‘ character in The Help) life, and at some point you have to stand up to your convictions and know that you’ll have to weather the storms; not everyone is going to like you, we are in a very subjective profession and art form where anything can hit someone and offend them, at the same time please them, you have no idea. But the only thing you can do at the end of the day is have a voice, and I found mine, thank god.”