Vanessa Williams

• 1. Introduction

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  Vanessa Williams arrived in the world with a birth announcement that read: "Here she is: Miss America." She was born on the 18th of March 1963 in Tarrytown, New York, a suburb of New York City. The line was a family joke at the time. It later became one of the strangest pieces of foreshadowing in American entertainment. Today she is a singer, actress, model, producer and dancer. Her career has run through pop charts, Broadway stages, network television and the West End of London. Yet the path was never straight. How does a child of two music teachers end up at the center of a national scandal and then still turn that story into decades of work? Why did one famous name become a legal problem? And what does it take to sing a number-one hit, play a scheming magazine editor and revive a Sondheim witch, all within one lifetime? The answers begin in a Westchester County classroom.

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• 2. A Musical Household

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  Her mother, Helen Tinch, and her father, Milton Augustine Williams Jr., met in the late 1950s as music education students at Fredonia State Teachers College. After they married, both became elementary school music teachers in separate districts. Milton also served for a long stretch as an assistant principal. Williams grew up in Millwood, New York, in a house where music was ordinary daily life. She studied classical and jazz dance, French horn, piano and violin. On Sundays she helped her mother, who played the organ for weddings and Mass at St. Theresa's Church in Briarcliff Manor, by turning pages of sheet music. Her mother had been raised Baptist and converted to Catholicism when she married. Williams was raised in her father's faith and baptized at Our Lady of Grace Church in the Bronx.

  Westchester County was a predominantly white, middle to upper-class suburb. Williams and her younger brother Chris, who later became an actor, grew up there. She believes she may have been the first African-American student in the Chappaqua Central School District to go from first grade through twelfth. Her family history reached further back into public life. A paternal great-great-grandfather, William Fields, was an African-American legislator in the Tennessee House of Representatives.

  At college time she had a choice. Carnegie Mellon University offered her its Presidential Scholarship for Drama, one of only 12 awarded. She turned it down and chose Syracuse University on a different scholarship. In 1981 she joined its Department of Drama as a musical theater major. She stayed only into her second year. The degree waited a long time. In May 2008 Syracuse granted her a Bachelor of Fine Arts, crediting the remaining requirements to her work on stage and screen, and she gave that year's convocation address.

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• 3. The Crown and the Photographs

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  On a pageant stage in 1983, Williams won the preliminary talent portion by singing "Happy Days Are Here Again." That performance was the first public recognition of her musical ability. She was crowned Miss America 1984 in September 1983, the first African-American woman to hold the title. Her reign did not last its full term. Several weeks before it was due to end, Penthouse magazine bought nude photographs of her and published them without her consent.

  The pictures dated to the summer of 1982. A photographer named Tom Chiapel had taken them, and they were sold to the magazine. Another photographer, Greg Whitman, had also photographed her that summer. After hearing of the sale, he sent a telegram to Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione offering more nude photographs. One photographer said in an interview that she had signed a release. Williams later explained why she would not pose again, saying, "people wouldn't forgive a second mistake."

  In July 1984 she was pressured to give up the crown. The first runner-up, Miss New Jersey 1983 Suzette Charles, succeeded her.

  The story had a second act more than three decades later. In September 2015 Williams returned to the pageant as head judge for Miss America 2016. Miss America's then CEO, Sam Haskell, publicly apologized to her for the events of 1984. Her recovery had begun much earlier, with a new husband who was also a publicist.

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• 4. Two Vanessa Williamses

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  At New York University in the 1980s, a registrar mentioned an unexpected coincidence to Williams. Another student of similar age, from the same state, had applied there under the identical name. That was Vanessa E. Williams, an actress whose career would keep crossing hers. The mix-ups started small. When Williams rode as Miss America in a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, the check for her appearance went to Vanessa E. by mistake, and Vanessa E. returned it.

  The bigger problem was a union rule. The Screen Actors Guild prohibited duplicate stage names. Vanessa E. had registered "Vanessa Williams" first, so Williams was sometimes credited as "Vanessa L. Williams" as a compromise. A project made things worse. Both women starred in versions of the drama Soul Food, Williams in the film and Vanessa E. in the television series. The Guild finally took the dispute to arbitration. Its ruling let both actresses use the professional name "Vanessa Williams." Williams's own name was settled, so her career could be judged on its work, and the charts came first.

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• 5. Chart Years

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  The Right Stuff, her debut album, arrived in 1988. Its title single and "He's Got the Look" both found success on the R&B chart. The third single, "Dreamin'," crossed over. It peaked at number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1989 and gave her a first number one on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. The album reached gold status in the United States, won an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding New Artist and brought three Grammy nominations. One was for Best New Artist at the 31st Grammy Awards.

  The Comfort Zone in 1991 became the biggest success of her recording career. "Running Back to You" reached the top twenty on the Hot 100 and hit the top of the R&B chart on the 5th of October 1991. The album also produced "Work to Do," a cover of an Isley Brothers song that reached number 3 on the R&B chart, and a club hit called "Freedom Dance (Get Free!)." Then came "Save the Best for Last." It spent five weeks at number one in the United States. It also topped the charts in Australia, the Netherlands and Canada, and reached the top five in Japan, Ireland and the United Kingdom. The album sold 2.2 million copies in the United States on release and was later certified triple platinum. It earned five Grammy nominations. Williams sang the song live at the 1993 Grammy Awards.

  The Sweetest Days followed in 1994 to highly favorable reviews. It moved through jazz, hip hop, rock and Latin-flavored songs, including "Betcha Never" and "You Can't Run," both written and produced by Babyface. It went platinum and earned two Grammy nominations. In 1996 she sang the national anthem at Super Bowl XXX. Her voice also reached film audiences through "Colors of the Wind," the Golden Globe- and Academy Award-winning song.

  More than three decades after her debut, she started her own label. Mellian Music released "Legs (Keep Dancing)" on the 26th of April 2024. It debuted at number 3 on Billboard's Dance/Electronic Digital Song Sales chart, her first hit there. Her ninth studio album, Survivor, followed on the 23rd of August 2024. She has passed 250 million total streams on Spotify.

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• 6. Broadway and the West End

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  Williams began her stage career in the 1985 production One Man Band, playing one of "the women." Her Broadway debut came in 1994, when she replaced Chita Rivera as Aurora in Kiss of the Spider Woman. The role let her carry an ascendant music career into the theater. In 1998 she played Della Green in a revival of St. Louis Woman. In 2002 she played Carmen Jones in a special Kennedy Center performance.

  That same year she took on a role that critics and audiences still remember. She played the Witch in a revival of Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods, which won the Tony and Drama Desk Awards as a production. The company revised songs for her. She earned a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical at the 56th Tony Awards, plus a Drama Desk nomination. Sondheim stayed part of her career. From the 19th of March to the 13th of June 2010 she performed in Sondheim on Sondheim at Studio 54, a revue built from his music, film and videotaped interviews.

  Other stage roles followed. In 2013 she starred as Jessie Mae Watts in Horton Foote's The Trip to Bountiful, which became a television film in 2014. That same year she joined the Broadway musical After Midnight. In 2015 she appeared as Julie La Verne in a PBS production of Show Boat. On the 14th of April 2022 she began performances as Margaret in POTUS at the Shubert Theatre. In February 2024 she was cast as Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, first at Theatre Royal, Plymouth, and then at the Dominion Theatre in London's West End.

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• 7. Screen Roles

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  Her first television appearance was on The Love Boat in 1984. In 1995 she starred as Rose Alvarez in a television adaptation of the 1960 Broadway musical Bye Bye Birdie. In 1997 she played the nymph Calypso in Hallmark Entertainment's The Odyssey. In 2000 she starred in the Lifetime film The Courage to Love, about Henriette DeLille. In 2003 she read the narrative of Tempie Herndon Durham, from the WPA slave narratives, in the HBO documentary Unchained Memories.

  Then came Wilhelmina Slater. In 2006 Williams drew considerable attention for playing the comic villain on ABC's Ugly Betty, a former model turned magazine editor-in-chief. She appeared in 85 episodes. The role earned Primetime Emmy nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series at the 59th Primetime Emmy Awards, and again in 2008 and 2009. She next joined Desperate Housewives in its seventh season as Renee Perry, an old college "frenemy" of Lynette Scavo, played by Felicity Huffman. Later villains included General Cynthia Rockwell on The Librarians in 2016 and Maxine Robinson on the VH1 series Daytime Divas in 2017.

  In film she won an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actress in a Motion Picture for playing Teri Joseph in the 1997 film Soul Food. She won Best Actress honors at three festivals, including the Harlem International Film Festival, for the 2007 independent film My Brother. She co-starred with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Eraser, Samuel L. Jackson in the 2000 Shaft reboot and Miley Cyrus in Hannah Montana: The Movie. In The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland she played the Queen of Trash. Her voice work includes Amanda Waller in the animated films Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay and Batman: Hush.

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• 8. Beyond the Spotlight

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  In the 1990s, Williams became the first African-American spokesmodel for L'Oréal cosmetics. In 2018 she returned to the brand for its "Age Perfect" campaign alongside Helen Mirren, Julianne Moore and Jane Fonda. She also appears for Proactiv Solution, and in March 2016 she launched her own clothing line, V. by Vanessa Williams, for EVINE Live. In 2012 she voiced Ms. Brown, a new brown M&M, in a commercial that ran during Super Bowl XLVI. Her game-show appearances raised money for charity. In 2009 she won $50,000 for her charity as a celebrity guest on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. In 2020 she won an episode of RuPaul's Secret Celebrity Drag Race and gave her $20,000 prize to The Trevor Project.

  Her private life has been public too. In April 2012 she and her mother Helen published a memoir, You Have No Idea. It covers her childhood, her rise to fame and her life with type 1 diabetes, as well as being sexually molested by a woman at age ten. Williams has married three times. Her first husband was Ramon Hervey II, a public relations specialist hired to rebuild her career after the resignation. They married in 1987, had three children named Melanie, Jillian and Devin, and divorced in 1997. In 1999 she married NBA player Rick Fox. They had a daughter, Sasha Gabriella, and divorced in 2004. She married businessman Jim Skrip in 2015, after a Church annulment of her first marriage. They divorced quietly in 2021.

  In 2013 an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? sent her looking into her roots. Her DNA results showed 23 percent Ghanaian and 17 percent British ancestry. She supports Dress For Success, sits on the board of The Sheen Center for Thought and Culture, and in 2011 took part in New Yorkers for Marriage Equality. She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on the 19th of March 2007, and her honors include eleven Grammy nominations and seven NAACP Image Awards. Her next stage run, as Miranda Priestly in London, shows she is not finished.

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