The Conversation

Viola Davis' Personal Story Will Make You Love Her Even More

A young girl grows up hungry but goes on to become an award-winning actress. Hollywood script? No, that's the real deal for Viola Davis—and the reason she's fighting to help 17 million kids just like her. At home in Granada Hills, California, Viola Davis opens her stainless-steel refrigerator. It's stocked with almond milk, tofu, low-sugar orange juice, and organic meat. On a table there's a bowl filled with bananas; around the newly remodeled kitchen, all kinds of ingredients for smoothies. Such healthy abundance was unimaginable for Davis while growing up. As she puts it simply: "We had no food." Until recently the actress—a two-time Oscar nominee (The Help and Doubt) who is now wowing audiences in ABC's How to Get Away With Murder—has kept many of the harrowing details of her childhood to herself. That changed last year, when she realized she could do something for the nearly 17 million kids in America who are hungry. She could tell her story, and she could fight for change at the same time. Born 49 years ago on her grandmother's farm, a former slave plantation in St. Matthews, South Carolina, Davis grew up with five siblings. Her mother had an eighth-grade education;

A young girl grows up hungry but goes on to become an award-winning actress. Hollywood script? No, that's the real deal for Viola Davis—and the reason she's fighting to help 17 million kids just like her.

At home in Granada Hills, California, Viola Davis opens her stainless-steel refrigerator. It's stocked with almond milk, tofu, low-sugar orange juice, and organic meat. On a table there's a bowl filled with bananas; around the newly remodeled kitchen, all kinds of ingredients for smoothies. Such healthy abundance was unimaginable for Davis while growing up. As she puts it simply: "We had no food."

Until recently the actress—a two-time Oscar nominee (The Help and Doubt) who is now wowing audiences in ABC's How to Get Away With Murder—has kept many of the harrowing details of her childhood to herself. That changed last year, when she realized she could do something for the nearly 17 million kids in America who are hungry. She could tell her story, and she could fight for change at the same time.

Born 49 years ago on her grandmother's farm, a former slave plantation in St. Matthews, South Carolina, Davis grew up with five siblings. Her mother had an eighth-grade education; her father, who groomed horses at a racetrack, made it only to fifth grade. When the family moved to Rhode Island, they got permission to live rent-free in buildings slated to be demolished; "128 Washington Street was infested with rats," recalls Davis. She'd huddle with her sisters on a top bunk, where they'd wrap bedsheets around their necks to protect themselves from bites, horrified at the sounds of rodents eating pigeons on the roof. (Even now, she says, "When my sister and I have a nightmare, we say it was about 128.") Then, when Davis was eight, the girls won a local skit contest, which launched her passion for acting. The prize? A softball kit with a red plastic bat. Back at home, one sister used it to pummel the rats.

But even harder to bear than the vermin was hunger—ever present and completely preoccupying. After the first-of-the-month welfare check arrived, Davis' parents would buy groceries, yet the food would quickly disappear. "It was like, If you don't eat it now, it'll be gone, and you're going to be hungry for the next—Lord, who knows how long," Davis remembers. She constantly plotted how to get food, befriending a boy whose mother would give her banana bread, or joining a summer program for the free Kool-Aid and doughnuts. She even remembers digging through a Dumpster. At school, she says, "I was always so hungry and ashamed, I couldn't tap into my potential. I couldn't get at the business of being me."

But somehow she did: After discovering her love of acting in high school, she earned scholarships to study theater at Rhode Island College and to attend the Juilliard School in New York City. Her screen debut was a blink of a role—a nurse in 1996's The Substance of Fire. But by 2001 she was winning Tonys on Broadway, the first one for playing a mother fighting for abortion rights in King Hedley II. Despite all the accolades since, Davis says, it has taken seven years of therapy, along with support from her husband of 11 years, Julius Tennon, and the adoption of their daughter, Genesis, now four, for her to fully accept her life in all of its success, failure, beauty, and mess. "One thing that is missing from the vision boards is what happens when you don't get what you want," she says. "Your ability to adapt to failure, and navigate your way out of it, absolutely 100 percent makes you who you are."

A journey like Davis' takes serious inner power, notes Shonda Rhimes, an executive producer of How to Get Away With Murder (in which Davis plays a seductive, ruthless criminal-law professor and lawyer). Davis "began life [with] a profound lack of choices," Rhimes says. "Instead of settling or giving up, she built her own path all the way to the acting icon she is now. That, with her dedication to motherhood and her tireless efforts to make a difference, is inspiring."

So far, Davis has helped raise over $4.5 million for Hunger Is, a new campaign by the Safeway Foundation and the Entertainment Industry Foundation (you can learn more at hungeris.org). Friends like Rhimes and Streep are supporters, "and yes, I'm going to hit up more of my friends," says Davis. "This is the richest country in the world. There's no reason kids should be going to school hungry. Food is something that everyone should have. It just is." Her efforts are especially appreciated in her old neighborhood, where families often have to choose between a meal or medicine, according to Hugh Minor, spokesman for the Rhode Island Community Food Bank. "It is so powerful for Viola Davis to say, 'I was affected by hunger—and many people still are,' " he says. "It really is a rallying call for people to do something."

In one memorable episode of How to Get Away With Murder, Davis removes her makeup, eyelashes, and wig, physically and figuratively stripping herself vulnerable before confronting her husband about his infidelity. That scene was her idea. She wanted to show a woman so powerful, so put-together in the outside world, taking off her mask. "I'm finally comfortable with my story," says Davis. "And I finally understand what [mythologist] Joseph Campbell meant when he said: 'The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.'"

Her words to live by: "I tell my daughter every morning, 'Now, what are the two most important parts of you?' And she says, 'My head and my heart.' Because that's what I've learned in the foxhole: What gets you through life is strength of character and strength of spirit and love.