Viola Davishas built a career that seems almost unimaginable when you know where her story began. Born on Aug. 11, 1965, in St. Matthews, South Carolina, Davis was the fifth of six children. When she was an infant, her family moved to Central Falls, Rhode Island, where her father worked as a horse groomer and her mother worked as a maid, factory worker, and homemaker. The family struggled with extreme poverty, and Davis has been incredibly candid about what it was like to grow up without many of the things other children took for granted.
In her powerful memoir Finding Me, Davis put that childhood into words: “We were ‘po.’ That’s a level lower than poor. I’ve heard some of my friends say, ‘We were poor, too, but I just didn’t know it until I got older,’ she says. “We were poor and we knew it.” She describes living in apartments with unreliable plumbing, frequently having no hot water or gas, and relying on food stamps and secondhand clothing and furniture.
The shame and hardship of those years followed Davis into school. She writes, “We had bed-wetting issues, our clothes were rarely washed, and we didn't have hot water to bathe. The smell of urine, old sweat, and mold followed my sisters and me into the classroom. The shame of smelling bad is a specific kind of trauma that sticks to your ribs. You try to shrink yourself so no one will notice you, but the smell always gives you away.”
But Davis also found something that would eventually change the trajectory of her life: acting. After discovering her passion for performance as a teenager, she studied theater at Rhode Island College and graduated in 1988. She then attended the prestigious Juilliard School in New York City, beginning the professional training that would launch an extraordinary career onstage and onscreen.
From those difficult beginnings, Davis went on to become one of the most acclaimed actors of her generation. She earned her first Academy Award nomination for Doubt, received another for The Help, and won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Rose Maxson in Fences. In fact, she is one of the few people on the planet to achieve the coveted EGOT status, having won Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Awards.
And so, in honor of Viola Davis's birthday on August 11 and the extraordinary life she has built from circumstances that could have easily defined her, she is an especially fitting choice for today's Quote of the Day.
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Quote of the Day by Viola Davis
“It’s futile to ask why. Instead, ask yourself, ‘What did I learn from this?’” —Viola Davis
Davis wrote those words in Finding Me, her deeply personal 2022 memoir about growing up in poverty, confronting painful experiences from her childhood and finding her way to a life and career she once could hardly have imagined. The quote comes as part of her reflection on the experiences that shaped her and the scars that remain.
Rather than spending her life trying to understand why difficult things happened to her, Davis suggests a different question: What can those experiences teach us? It is a powerful shift from looking backward for an explanation to looking forward for meaning.
Related: Quote of the Day: Psychologist B.F. Skinner on Perseverance, Reframing and Never Giving Up
Davis's words are especially powerful because she isn't speaking from a life untouched by hardship. She knows what it means to experience poverty, humiliation, racism, bullying and trauma. Her memoir doesn't gloss over those experiences or pretend that everything happens for a reason. Instead, she asks us to consider what we can take from what we've survived. As she went on to write, "What have I learned from all of it? There is absolutely no way whatsoever to get through this life without scars."
There is a difference between asking Why did this happen to me? and asking What did this teach me? The first question can keep us trapped in the past. The second gives us the possibility of moving forward. It doesn't erase what happened. It allows us to decide what happens next.
That may be the most inspiring part of Davis's story. The little girl who grew up knowing she was poor became a Juilliard-trained actor, a Tony, Emmy, Grammy, and an Academy Award winner. With her production company, JuVee Productions, co-founded with her husband, Julius Tennon, she champions diverse stories while nurturing emerging and established underrepresented voices.
Davis' life is a powerful reminder that our beginnings can shape us without having to determine where we end up. And sometimes, the lessons we learn from the hardest chapters become part of what makes the next chapter possible.
More Quotes by Viola Davis
"I believe that the privilege of a lifetime is being who you are, truly being who you are."
"My elixir: I am no longer ashamed of myself. I own everything that happened to me."
"Do not live someone else's life and someone else's idea of what womanhood is. Womanhood is you."
“My biggest discovery was that you can literally re-create your life. You can redefine it. You don’t have to live in the past. I found that not only did I have fight in me, I had love.”
“Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a different past. They tell you successful therapy is when you have the big discovery that your parents did the best they could with what they were given.”
“I now understand that life, and living it, is more about being present. I’m now aware that the not-so-happy memories lie in wait; but the hope and the joy also lie in wait.”
Next, Viola Davis Has the Perfect Reaction to Becoming a Meme After the Actor Awards
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