Cynthia Erivo

Cynthia Erivo was born on 8 January 1987 in Stockwell, south London, to Igbo Nigerian immigrant parents who had come to the UK in their early twenties. Her parents separated when she was very young, and her mother, Edith, a nurse, raised Cynthia and her sister Nicolette in a single-parent home. She first performed in a school Christmas play at five, singing Silent Night as a solo.

She began a degree in music psychology at the University of East London but transferred after a year to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, graduating in 2010. She quickly made an impression in the West End, and in 2013 played Celie in a production of The Color Purple at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London, which launched her career.

Erivo made her Broadway debut in the 2015 revival of The Color Purple, alongside Danielle Brooks and Jennifer Hudson, and won the 2016 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, the Drama Desk Award, and, with the cast, the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. She also won a Daytime Emmy in 2017, for the cast's performance on the Today show.

In 2019 she played the abolitionist Harriet Tubman in the film Harriet, for which she received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, and a second nomination for Best Original Song for Stand Up, which she co-wrote and performed. She went on to play Aretha Franklin in the series Genius: Aretha and received a Primetime Emmy nomination.

She was cast as Elphaba, the green-skinned witch, opposite Ariana Grande's Glinda in Jon M. Chu's two-part film adaptation of Wicked. The first film (2024) brought her a second Best Actress Oscar nomination, making her only the second Black actress, after Viola Davis, to be nominated in the category more than once, and her recording of Defying Gravity with Grande won her a second Grammy. She is one of the few people nominated for an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony, and has won every one except the Oscar.