Kerry Washington

Info

Full Name: Kerry Washington
Date of birth: January 31, 1977 (49 years old)
Location: Bronx, New York
Country: USA

Kerry Washington has been active for 25 years, participating in 26 movies that average a 5.7/10 score.

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Biography

When ABC launched 'Scandal' in 2012, no Black woman had led the cast of a drama on an American network for nearly forty years. The last had been Teresa Graves in 1974. Kerry Washington played Olivia Pope, the crisis manager who cleans up Washington's messes in a white coat with a glass of red wine in her hand, and the show ran seven seasons and 124 episodes.

A Bronx childhood

She was born in the Bronx on 31 January 1977, the only child of Valerie, a university professor and education consultant, and Earl Washington, an estate agent. She went to the Spence School in Manhattan and graduated from George Washington University in 1998 with a double major in anthropology and sociology, Phi Beta Kappa. She had acted since childhood and trained at the Michael Howard Studios in New York.

Her first film was 'Our Song' (2000), an independent drama about three Brooklyn teenagers that played Sundance. 'Save the Last Dance' followed in 2001, with Julia Stiles, and soon after came a part in 'The Human Stain', Robert Benton's version of the Philip Roth novel with Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman.

Wives, girlfriends and the odd real part

In 2004 she played Della Bea Robinson, Ray Charles's wife, in 'Ray', the Taylor Hackford film that won Jamie Foxx an Oscar. That same year she made 'She Hate Me' for Spike Lee, who used her again in 'Miracle at St. Anna' (2008).

Then came a run of big productions in which she was almost always somebody's partner: the secretary in 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith' (2005), with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, and the blind sculptor Alicia Masters in 'Fantastic Four' (2005) and 'Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer' (2007), alongside Chris Evans, Jessica Alba and Ioan Gruffudd.

The part that lifted her out of that was Kay Amin, the Ugandan dictator's third wife, in 'The Last King of Scotland' (2006), Kevin Macdonald's film with Forest Whitaker and James McAvoy. After it came the suburban thriller 'Lakeview Terrace' (2008) opposite Samuel L. Jackson, the ensemble piece 'The Dead Girl' (2006), 'Mother and Child' (2009) for Rodrigo García, and 'For Colored Girls' (2010) for Tyler Perry.

She made her Broadway debut in 2009 in 'Race', David Mamet's play about two lawyers and a rape case, with James Spader.

Olivia Pope changes everything

2012 was her year twice over. Quentin Tarantino cast her as Broomhilda von Shaft, the enslaved wife Jamie Foxx is searching for in 'Django Unchained', with Leonardo DiCaprio, Christoph Waltz and Samuel L. Jackson. Months earlier, Shonda Rhimes's series had turned her into a television star at 35.

Olivia Pope was based on Judy Smith, a real crisis manager who worked in George H. W. Bush's White House and produced the show. Washington was the first Black actress nominated for the lead drama actress Emmy in eighteen years, in 2013 and 2014, and never won it. She produced the series too, which ended in 2018.

Her only Emmy came from behind the camera: she won in 2020 as a producer of 'Live in Front of a Studio Audience', the live special that restaged episodes of classic sitcoms. By then she had set up her own company, Simpson Street, in 2016.

Anita Hill, Broadway and two mothers in Ohio

That company produced her best recent work. She played Anita Hill in 'Confirmation' (2016), HBO's film about the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, and earned another Emmy nomination. In 2020 she shared the lead and the producing credit with Reese Witherspoon on 'Little Fires Everywhere', from Celeste Ng's novel about two mothers at war in a comfortable corner of Ohio.

She returned to Broadway in 2018 with 'American Son', about a mother waiting for news of her son in a Florida police station, directed by Kenny Leon with Steven Pasquale. The following year she took it to Netflix with the same cast and her name on the production.

Lighter jobs filled the gaps: the homophobic mother in 'The Prom' (2020), Ryan Murphy's musical with Meryl Streep and James Corden; Professor Dovey in 'The School for Good and Evil' (2022), Paul Feig's fantasy with Charlize Theron and Michelle Yeoh; a voice in 'Cars 3' (2017) and a recurring one on 'The Simpsons' since 2022. In 2023 she led the comedy drama 'UnPrisoned', about a therapist whose father moves in after leaving prison.

'Thicker than Water' and the life off set

In 2018 she agreed to appear on 'Finding Your Roots', the American public television genealogy show. When her parents learned that the programme would analyse the family's DNA, they sat her down and told her something they had kept to themselves for forty years: her father was not her biological father, and she had been conceived by donor insemination. She wrote about it in her 2023 memoir 'Thicker than Water', along with an eating disorder at university and an abortion in her twenties.

She married the former NFL cornerback and actor Nnamdi Asomugha on 24 June 2013, at a quiet ceremony in Idaho that nobody heard about until afterwards. They have two children, Isabelle, born in 2014, and Caleb, born in 2016, and she describes herself as a mother of three because she counts his elder daughter. She has kept the children out of sight with some success.

Politics has taken up a good deal of her time without her ever running for anything. She spoke at the 2012 Democratic convention for Barack Obama, hosted one of the nights of the 2020 one, and was among those named to the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities when Joe Biden revived it.

The last two years have been busy. She was Major Charity Adams, commander of the all-Black women's battalion that cleared the US Army's backlog of post during the Second World War, in 'The Six Triple Eight' (2024) for Tyler Perry. Then came the action thriller 'Shadow Force' (2025), with Omar Sy, and the tightly wound lawyer Vera Draven in 'Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery', Rian Johnson's third mystery with Daniel Craig, which reached Netflix in December 2025.

In March 2026 Apple TV released 'Imperfect Women', the limited series in which she plays Eleanor, one of three lifelong friends bound together by a murder, with Elisabeth Moss and Kate Mara. On 9 October 'Animals' arrived on Netflix, the thriller about the kidnapping of a Los Angeles mayoral candidate's son, directed by and starring Ben Affleck, with Washington as his wife, plus Gillian Anderson and Steven Yeun. Reviews have been rough.

The next job is already signed. On 5 October 2026 Apple renewed 'Imperfect Women' for a second season that drops the source novel and is built entirely around her character, back among her family on Martha's Vineyard.