Career
Woodard has made numerous appearances in television series and motion pictures. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the 1983 film Cross Creek. In 1993 she starred in the film Passion Fish for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. She also appeared in the films Heart and Souls, Crooklyn, How to Make an American Quilt, Primal Fear, in Down in the Delta as a single alcoholic mother from Chicago forced to spend a summer with her uncle in Mississippi, and as Lily Sloane, Zefram Cochrane's assistant in Star Trek: First Contact.
In 1997 she starred in the HBO film Miss Evers' Boys, for which she won an Emmy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a CableACE Award, an NAACP Image Award and a Satellite Awards.
Woodard's television credits include Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, Faerie Tale Theatre (in "Puss in Boots"), L.A. Law, and Homicide: Life on the Street. Woodard has won four Primetime Emmy Awards for her performances in the series Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law and The Practice, as well as the television movie Miss Evers' Boys. Woodard has received Emmy nominations for Words by Heart, St. Elsewhere, Unnatural Causes, a second nomination for St. Elsewhere, A Mother's Courage: The Mary Thomas Story, The Piano Lesson, Gulliver's Travels, Homicide: Life on the Street, and The Water Is Wide.
In 2003, Woodard, took part in the HBO film Unchained Memories, a dramatization of WPA slave narratives. From 2005 to 2006, Woodard starred in the ABC series Desperate Housewives, and received another Emmy nomination for her role as Betty Applewhite. Woodard has appeared on stage in such plays as Map of the World, Drowning Crow, Me & Bessie, and The Winter's Tale. She starred in Tyler Perry's latest film The Family That Preys. In 2009, she appeared in American Violet, playing the mother of a 24-year-old African American woman wrongfully swept up in a drug raid.
In 2010, she was a guest star in the third season of the Vampire Television series True Blood as Ruby Jean Reynolds. and was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2011 for her role.
She was most recently seen starring as Lt. Tanya Rice in TNT's original series Memphis Beat, for which she won Gracie Allen Awards for performance in a series. One critic said: "I originally tuned in for Jason Lee, who plays a police detective named Dwight who likes to croon the blues. But I was won over by Alfre Woodard, who plays Dwight’s by-the-book boss."
Read more about this topic: Alfre Woodard
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“In time your relatives will come to accept the idea that a career is as important to you as your family. Of course, in time the polar ice cap will melt.”
—Barbara Dale (b. 1940)
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)