Anna Deavere Smith facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Anna Deavere Smith
Smith in 1999
Born	(1950-09-18) September 18, 1950 (age 74) Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.
Education	Arcadia University (BA) American Conservatory Theater (MFA)
Occupation	Actress, playwright, professor

Anna Deavere Smith (born September 18, 1950) is an American actress, playwright, and professor. She is famous for her roles in TV shows like The West Wing, where she played Dr. Nancy McNally, and Nurse Jackie, where she was Gloria Akalitus. She also appeared in For the People as Tina Krissman.

Anna Deavere Smith has received many honors for her work. She won The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in 2013. In 2015, she was chosen as the Jefferson Lecturer, which is a big honor in the humanities. She also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Theatre Arts in 2016. She helped start the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue at New York University.

Early Life and Education

Anna Deavere Smith was born in 1950 in Baltimore, Maryland. Her mother, Anna Rosalind, was an elementary school principal, and her father, Deaver Young Smith Jr., was a coffee merchant. She has four younger brothers and sisters.

When Anna was young, schools in Baltimore were just starting to allow students of all races to attend together. She went to both mostly Black and mostly White schools. She graduated from Western High School, which was an all-girls school.

Smith studied acting at Beaver College, which is now called Arcadia University. She was one of only seven African-American women in her class and graduated in 1971. After that, she earned a master's degree in acting from the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, California.

Career Highlights

Theatre Work

Early in her career, Anna Deavere Smith performed in many plays. She even played Mistress Quickly in a Shakespeare play called The Merry Wives of Windsor. This play was set in New Orleans after the American Civil War. Anna was very good at changing herself to play different characters.

Smith is best known for her special style of theatre called "documentary theatre" or "verbatim theatre". In this style, she creates plays by interviewing many different people. Then, she performs all the different characters herself, using the exact words from the interviews.

Two of her most famous plays are Fires in the Mirror (1992) and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993).

• Fires in the Mirror was about the 1991 Crown Heights riot. Anna interviewed over 100 people for this play.
• Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 was about the 1992 Los Angeles riots. For this play, she interviewed about 300 people.

For these plays, she won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding One-Person Show two years in a row. Her plays House Arrest (2000) and Let Me Down Easy (2008) were also created in this unique style. Let Me Down Easy explored how strong and fragile the human body can be. It was even shown on PBS as part of the Great Performances series.

Film and Television Roles

Stephen Gaghan and Smith at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival

Anna Deavere Smith has acted in many movies. Some of her films include Philadelphia (1993), Dave (1993), The American President (1995), Rent (2005), and Rachel Getting Married (2008).

On television, she had important roles in The Practice (2000) and as Dr. Nancy McNally on The West Wing (2000–06). She also played Gloria Akalitus in the TV series Nurse Jackie from 2009 to 2015. In 2022, she appeared in the Netflix series Inventing Anna as Maud.

In 2015, Anna Deavere Smith was a guest on the PBS show Finding Your Roots. On the show, she learned about her family history in America for the first time. She found out she came from a long line of free people of color. Her great-great-grandfather, Basil Biggs, was born in 1820 and was a free veterinarian. He moved his family to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1858. A newspaper article from 1892 called him the "wealthiest Afro-American in Gettysburg."

Teaching and Writing

Besides acting and writing plays, Anna Deavere Smith is also a professor. She teaches in the Department of Art & Public Policy at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She has also taught at the University of Southern California, Stanford University, and Carnegie Mellon University.

Smith has also written books. Her first book, Talk to Me: Travels in Media and Politics, was published in 2000. In 2006, she released Letters to a Young Artist, which gives advice to young people who want to work in the arts. In 2023, her play This Ghost of Slavery: a Play of Past and Present was published in The Atlantic magazine.

Awards and Recognition

Anna Deavere Smith has received many awards for her amazing work.

• In 1993, she was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Fires in the Mirror.
• She was nominated for two Tony Awards in 1994 for Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992.
• She won a MacArthur Fellowship in 1996, which is sometimes called the "genius grant."
• In 2013, she won The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, which is one of the biggest awards in American arts.
• She received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2013.
• In 2015, she gave the Jefferson Lecture, which is the highest honor for achievement in the humanities in the U.S. government.

She has also received honorary degrees from many universities, including Yale University and Northwestern University. In 2019, she was chosen to be part of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Works

Film Appearances

Television Appearances

Stage Performances

Books Written

• Talk to Me: Travels in Media and Politics (2000)
• Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts – For Actors, Performers, Writers, and Artists of Every Kind (2006)

See also

In Spanish: Anna Deavere Smith para niños