Detailed Biography

Alfre Ette Woodard is an American actress.

Personal life

Woodard was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma to African American parents: Constance, a homemaker, and Marion H. Woodard, an entrepreneur and interior designer. Woodard attended Bishop Kelley High School, a private Catholic school in Tulsa. She studied drama at Boston University, from where she later graduated. Woodard lives in Santa Monica, California, with her husband, writer Roderick Spencer, and their two adopted children, Mavis and Duncan. Woodard follows Christian Science. She is a founder and board member of Artists for a New South Africa and is also active in the Democratic Party. In February 2009 she joined a group of American film directors and actors on a cultural trip to Iran at the invitation of the "House of Cinema" forum in Tehran. Alfre Woodard speaks for the Barack Obama campaign in New Philadelphia, Ohio, on 2008-02-20.

Career

Woodard has made numerous guest 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. She also appeared as Lily Sloane, Zefram Cochrane's assistant in Star Trek: First Contact and Down in the Delta as a single alcoholic mother from Chicago forced to spend a summer with her uncle in Mississippi.

Woodard's television credits include Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, Puss in Boots, L.A. Law, and Homicide: Life on the Street. Woodard has won four Primetime Emmy Awards for her television performances in Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, the television movie Miss Evers' Boys, and The Practice. She has also received Emmy nominations for Words by Heart, St. Elsewhere, Unnatural Causes, a second 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. 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.

Alfre Woodard's latest film is the upcoming American Violet, where she plays the mother of a 24-year-old African American woman who is wrongfully swept up in a drug raid.

Awards and nominations

Awards

Nominations