Audra McDonald wins best actress musical Tony
ABOVE PHOTO: Audra McDonald accepts the award for best performance by an actress in a musical for her role in "The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess," at the 66th Annual Tony Awards on Sunday June 10, 2012, in New York. At right is presenter Christopher Plummer.
(Photo by Charles Sykes /Invision/AP)
By Mark Kennedy
Associated Press
NEW YORK — Audra McDonald has won the Tony Award for best leading actress in a musical.
Considered the favorite for her powerful portrayal of Bess in "The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess," McDonald captured her fifth Tony, but first as a leading actress.
Raised in Fresno, Calif., and trained at The Juilliard School, she won three Tony Awards before the age of 30 — for "Carousel," ''Master Class" and "Ragtime" — and a fourth in 2004 for "A Raisin in the Sun."
She has two Grammy Awards, four albums and thinking of a fifth and two Emmy Award nominations. McDonald, a fierce advocate for gay marriage rights, has a daughter and recently was engaged.
She beat out Jan Maxwell, Cristin Milioti, Kelli O'Hara and Laura Osnes
+ Top Story
Zoe Saldana has played an alien and a future space traveler — but taking on the role of an actual famous person proved even harder. The 34-year-old star of Avatar and Star Trek plays pianist, singer and activist Nina Simone in the forthcoming biopic Nina.
Mel Brooks, director, producer, writer and actor, is in an elite group as one of the few entertainers to earn all four major entertainment prizes – the Tony, Emmy, Grammy, and Oscar. His career began in television writing for Your Show of Shows and...
Besides detailing the ups-and-downs of the turbulent, 2011 tennis season, this riveting and revealing documentary treats the audience to an intimate look at the close-knit sisters with the help of home movies from their adolescence.
His rise to success with “The Office” and his stand-up prowess quickly brought him to the attention of comedy maven Judd Apatow. Robinson made audiences question their notions of vanity, playing the sensitive bouncer in Knocked Up. He then kept audiences glued to their seats as...
A 17-year-old from Pittsburgh has won the fifth annual August Wilson Monologue Competition, performing a section of the playwright’s “King Hedley II” with powerful skill. Tambi Gxuluwe, who attends West Mifflin Area High School, took the first place trophy Monday night...
Collected and curated by Penn professor and PBS "History Detectives" host Tukufu Zuberi, forms the basis of a provocative new exhibition at the Penn Museum: Black Bodies in Propaganda: The Art of the War Poster, opening at 1:00 pm on June 2, 2013, and running through March 2, 2014.
“Twenty Feet from Stardom” - featuring Darlene Love, Merry Clayton, Tata Vega, Patti Austin among others - spotlights the untold true stories of the backup singers to some of the greatest musical legends of our era. And, because their stories begin most often in church...
In the upcoming science fiction film After Earth, our home planet goes through some serious changes over the next 1,000 years. So it’s fitting that the film’s stars, actor Will Smith and his son Jaden, would take some time to envision what the future of Earth might entail.