Viola Davis, the girl who grew up in a rat-infested hell to later succeed in Hollywood

While filming

in South Africa , Viola Davis had her Los Angeles home remodeled.

The actress asked a local designer to tone down the minimalist tone and inject more style into the space where she has lived for five years with her husband, fellow actor Julius Tennon, and Genesis, the couple's adopted 12-year-old daughter.

The interior designer gave the main dining room of the residence in the Toluca Lake neighborhood a monochrome touch with cloud wallpaper that costs almost $500 per ten meters.

The residence has been featured in the current issue of

In this you can appreciate the work that the designer did in the trophy room, where Davis, 57, has placed her Oscar, her Emmy and her Tony.

It will be the room that hosts the Grammy that the actress won on February 5, becoming the 18th artist to achieve the EGOT by winning the four major television, music, film and theater awards in the US ( Emmys, Grammys, Oscars and Tonys).

On the shelf, in addition to the trophies, are family photographs, books, and a framed version of

, the famous speech by the Rev. Martin Luther King.

With his conquest, Davis joins a list that includes composers Richard Rodgers, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, actresses Audrey Hepburn and Rita Moreno, and directors Mel Brooks and Mike Nichols, among others.

She becomes the third African-American to do so after Whoopi Goldberg and Jennifer Hudson.

The lavish residence of Davis and her husband is in stark contrast to the childhood home of Davis, who before becoming Hollywood royalty put in dozens of strong performances in dozens of titles until landing bigger roles in Duda (2008)

opposite

. Streep,

and

2011

, which earned him his first and second Oscar nominations.

This did not necessarily translate into more work, since he received offers for a few days of work, but not large roles.

This convinced her to start her production company JuVee, which she founded in 2011 with her husband to expand the offer of roles to black women in the industry.

In 2017 she got the statuette of the Film Academy thanks to

, directed by Denzel Washington.

She clinched the Emmy two years earlier thanks to

the

hit ABC courtroom drama.

Viola grew up in Central Falls, a tiny town in Rhode Island, in the eastern part of the country.

She was brought there by her father, Dan, a violent alcoholic who brutally beat his wife and who was a horse handler.

The man moved her family because there were two of the most visited racetracks in the country, which were experiencing a period of glory at that time.

But that bonanza never knocked on the door of the Davises, who settled at 128 Washington Street.

The artist affirms that the number 128 became synonymous with hell on earth.

Davis won an Oscar and a Tony for playing, in separate years, Rose in "Fences," a play by playwright August Wilson.

“I never ever went into the kitchen.

Rats had taken over the cabinets and the counter.

The plaster on the wall had fallen off, exposing the wooden boards that held the house together,” Davis notes in his biography,

.

The book became a bestseller in May 2022, shortly after its release.

“After reading the first paragraph, I knew this was going to be a book I wanted to share with the world,” said Oprah Winfrey, the famous television presenter, who added her biography to her popular book club.

The book has been on Amazon's bestseller list for more than 27 weeks ever since.

Davis won the Grammy for voicing her memoir.

Viola is the fifth of six children.

She was born in August 1965 in South Carolina, just months after Martin Luther King led the march in Selma, Alabama, a milestone in defending the rights of African-Americans.

The birth may have come in the midst of the civil rights movement in the US, but the childhood described by the artist was marked by the brutal history of the slaveholding South.

Davis was born in a cabin on a plantation, where her grandparents had been slaves.

Her mother, Mae Alice, married her 22-year-old husband at the age of 15. Neither finished high school.

“Rats always came out of nowhere.

You could be sitting on the sofa watching television and suddenly one would jump on the couch.

Or another would shoot out of a hole in the wall and run to hide under the sofa, ”writes the actress of her childhood home in Rhode Island, which lacked heat or hot water in winter.

There she was sexually abused by her only male brother, one of the few memories she doesn't delve into in a book where she comes to terms with her painful past.

She and her sisters would fall asleep listening to the animals gnaw at their toys or eat birds on the roof of the house.

The girls covered their necks with blankets to avoid being chewed.

In a recent conversation, Davis said that in her 20s she realized that she had gone a lifetime without a good night's sleep.

She slept, straight, no more than two hours.

“That's why I'd fall asleep in class, I'm scared of the dark, all the horrible things from my childhood would happen in the middle of the night,” she recounted.

The fear was so paralyzing that she would rather piss herself than stand in the bathroom.

Viola Davis wet the bed until she was 14 years old.

The theater as an escape

The sisters became expert rodent hunters with a big red plastic bat.

That was the prize for winning a local talent contest with a comedy number based on the Davises' favorite TV shows.

That was Viola's first brush with acting.

It was also the first activity for which she received applause and positive comments after a childhood filled with scarcity and humiliation.

The theater served as an escape and refuge.

She and her sister, Dianne, were the first in the family to go to college.

She and Deloris, her older sister, invented Haji and Haha, two wealthy white women, with teaware and abundant jewelry.

Their minds turned the depressing unheated apartment into a Beverly Hills mansion for hours.

“We played with the sound of my mother being beaten and screaming in pain in the background.

We thought we were in that world until Deloris broke the spell by saying, 'You're not Haha, you're poor, you're on assistance and you don't have diamonds,'” Davis says.

After studying drama at the University of Rhode Island, where less than 1% of the student body was black, Asian or Latino, Davis made it her goal to move to New York for one simple reason.

She wanted to study at a school where it would be easier for her to have jobs to pay for her living.

She tried out for Juilliard with The Color Purple and Moliere's Wise Women.

The audition was not easy for a 180-pound black woman among students who had studied singing and ballet since they were little.

But she got it.

She was the second African American in a generation with 856 students from different disciplines.

There is one name from the world of tables that runs through Davis' life: August Wilson.

The playwright, who died in 2005, set out to write the definitive chronicle of black life in the United States through a decalogue of works.

Each would address a decade in which he exalted the lives of various everyday characters.

These works are known as the Pittsburgh Cycle.

The effort was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, which have made Wilson one of the most acclaimed recent writers.

Viola Davis and Meryl Streep joke around at the 2018 Oscars.Chris Pizzello (AP)

Davis made a name for herself on the stage with

, one of Wilson's plays.

The 1996 montage about a group of friends of a blues guitarist.

It was easy for Viola to play Vera, an ex-girlfriend of the musician, a character moved by pain.

Her performance took her across the country and her work was praised by Angela Bassett, Halle Berry, Barbara Streisand and Vanessa Redgrave.

“More than the Oscars or the Emmys, Broadway is everything.

It lives up to what the dream is, ”she assures.

Fences

is another of Wilson's works that gave Viola Davis a lot of renown.

The actress used her complex family history to play Rose, the wife of Troy, who was a promising black baseball player in his youth (Denzel Washington).

The reality of the 50s transformed him into a garbage truck employee.

Rose had to keep her family together, even as she led him to sacrifice her dreams and endure deception.

Washington and Davis both won the 2010 Tony Award for their performances in the play.

The actor adapted the play for film and directed Davis six years later in what is considered one of his best performances.

“For the first time I experienced what it is like to feel that I deserved something”, confesses the actress.

Her intuition was correct.

In February 2017, when she won the Oscar for best supporting actress, Viola Davis remembered Jaji and Haha at the Dolby theater.

“Thank you very much for the imagination,” she said to Deloris, her present sister, in a nod to one of the moments of freedom from her harsh childhood.

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