LOST AND FOUND

She's the only black actor to win an Oscar, Emmy and Tony Award. Now Viola Davis is playing Michelle Obama and opening up about her tough path to the top

- DIANA EVANS

MANY of us had existential thoughts during the lockdown and distracted ourselves with new hobbies. We did 1 000-piece puzzle, knitted and baked overzealously. For Viola Davis, knocking around in her mansion in Toluca Lake, Los Angeles, it was writing.

"I lost my mind during the pandemic," she tells me from her bedroom, dressed in a grey sweatshirt and loose woollen hat. "I just wandered around this house." Although she's able to laugh about it all now, Finding Me, the memoir that resulted from this time spent writing, is anything but light and has set a new benchmark for the celebrity confessional.

Over a matter of months - interrupted by the filming of The First Lady, in which she plays Michelle Obama, and The Woman King, a historical drama set in the Kingdom of Dahomey (now southern Benin) in West Africa, she grappled on the page with the spectre of her poverty-stricken childhood and her subsequent thorny rise to the top, a place that turned out to be less comfortable than imagined.

"Whenever you're still, whenever you're quiet, whenever you put everything down, then everything in your life comes into full focus. It comes at you like a jackhammer," she says of the big Covid-induced pause.

But it wasn't only the pandemic that led her to the blank screen. The crisis was already in process.

"I think it's been happening ever since my status started to rise," she says. "When it first rises, it's nothing but excitement, nothing but an understanding that this is a culmination of your hard work, your talent. You just feel like God has blessed you - I still feel that.