Kerry Marisa Washington is an American actress, producer, and director. She gained wide public recognition for starring as crisis management expert Olivia Pope in the ABC drama series Scandal. In film, Washington is known for her roles as Della Bea Robinson in Ray, Kay in The Last King of Scotland, and as Alicia Masters in the live-action Fantastic Four films of 2005 and 2007. Washington has won a Primetime Emmy Award and five NAACP Image Awards, including The President’s Award.
About Kerry Washington in brief
Kerry Marisa Washington is an American actress, producer, and director. She gained wide public recognition for starring as crisis management expert Olivia Pope in the ABC drama series Scandal. In film, Washington is known for her roles as Della Bea Robinson in Ray, Kay in The Last King of Scotland, and as Alicia Masters in the live-action Fantastic Four films of 2005 and 2007. She has also starred in the independent films Our Song, The Dead Girl, Mother and Child, Night Catches Us, and American Son. Time magazine included Washington in its Time 100 list of most influential people in 2014. In 2018, Forbes named her the eighth highest-paid television actress. Washington has won a Primetime Emmy Award and five NAACP Image Awards, including The President’s Award. She is a cousin of former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. Washington performed with the TADA! Youth Theater teen group and attended the Spence School in Manhattan from her pre-teen years until graduating from high school in 1994. At the age of 13, she was taken to watch Nelson Mandela speak at Yankee Stadium upon his release from prison. Washington got her Screen Actors Guild card as a requirement for a commercial that she starred in. She was in the cast of the 1996 PBS sketch comedy-style educational series Standard Deviants, and she appeared in the short \”3D\” and the feature film Our Song in 2000.
In 2002 she played Chris Rock’s love interest in the spy thriller Bad Company, a film that represented a turning point for her, in that it was the first time in her career that she had made enough money annually to qualify for health insurance under SAG. In 2004, she played the female lead in Spike Lee’s She Hate Me and she received strong reviews for her performance as a wife of 1970 Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. After she held parts in Mr. Smith & Mrs Smith, Little I Love My Wife, and I Think I Love my Wife, she became a spokesperson for L’Oréal, appearing in commercials and ads alongside Scarlett Johansson and Eva Longoria. In 2007, she co-directed the music video for hip-hop artist Common’s song, ‘I Want You’, the fourth single from his album Finding Forever. In April 2016, Washington confirmed that, in the 1990s in New York, she learned to dance from Jennifer Lopez. She is from a mixed-race background and from Jamaica, so she is partly English and Scottish and Native American, but also descended from enslaved Africans in the Caribbean. She attended George Washington University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1998 with a double major in anthropology and sociology. She went on to appear in several movies, including Save the Last Dance and The Human Stain.
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