Viola

This was the year the world realized women's stories Deserve To be seen and Heard. Viola Davis has made that her mission for three Decades

- Carvell Wallace

IN A CRAMPED TRAILER ON THE SET OF THE hit ABC show How to Get Away With Murder, I get to watch Viola Davis go into makeup. “I come in here busted up,” she says playfully, still holding what appears to be an already hour-old paper cup of coffee. “I just sit here, and they transform me.” She is smiling, perched in a vinyl makeup chair, her head loosely wrapped in a brown silk bonnet.

In the three-decades-long journey to this moment, Davis, 53, has played so many parts she says she can’t remember them all. If there is a woman with a struggle, Viola Davis has been asked—and has found a way—to inhabit her. Wives and maids. Doctors and artists. Grieving mothers and desperate drug addicts. In the female-led thriller Widows, out now, she’s the wife of a fallen heist man. Her performance, which is already garnering Oscar buzz, manages to cut prototypical crime-boss badassery with a roiling undercurrent of personal grief.