Phylicia Rashad

Phylicia Rashad

Phylicia Rashad is an American actress, singer and stage director. She is known for her role as Clair Huxtable on the NBC sitcom The Cosby Show. In 2004, Rashad became the first black actress to win the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.

About Phylicia Rashad in brief

Summary Phylicia RashadPhylicia Rashad is an American actress, singer and stage director. She is known for her role as Clair Huxtable on the NBC sitcom The Cosby Show. In 2004, Rashad became the first black actress to win the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. She won a NAACP Image Award when she reprised her A Raisin in the Sun role in the 2008 television adaptation. She has also appeared in the films For Colored Girls, Good Deeds, Creed, and Creed II. In 2009, she appeared as Violet, the drug-addicted matriarch in Tracy Letts’ award-winning play August: Osage County. In early 2014 Rashad directed a revival of August Wilson’s Fences, also by Wilson, which ran to generally positive reviews. In 2016, she starred on Broadway as Big Mama in an all African-American production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Ma Rainey. She appeared alongside stage veterans James Earl Jones and Anika Noni Rose as noni Rose in the film Noni, as well as actor Terrence Howard as Noni.

She was dubbed \”The Mother Of The Black Community\” at the 2010 NAACP Image Awards. In 1978, she released the album Josephine Superstar, a disco concept album telling the life story of Josephine Baker. The album was mainly written and produced by Jacques Morali and Rashad’s second husband Victor Willis, original lead singer and lyricist of the Village People. She met Willis while they were both cast in The Wiz. Rashad studied at Howard University, graduating magna cum laude in 1970 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Her mother, Vivian Ayers, is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated artist, poet, playwright, scholar, and publisher. Her siblings are jazz-musician brother Tex ; sister Debbie Allen, an actress, choreographer, and director; and brother Hugh Allen. While Rashad was growing up, her family moved to Mexico, and as a result, she speaks Spanish fluently.