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At an age when many are winding down or retiring all together, Phylicia Rashad is working more than ever. Her last year was especially busy, and not just for a woman closing in on her 80s. As a director, she made her Broadway debut with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Branden Jacobs Jenkins’ Purpose starring LaTanya Richardson, Harry Lennix and Kara Young, who won her second Tony for it. Purpose also won the Tony for best play.
On screen, she starred in the faith-based Netflix film Ruth & Boaz produced by Tyler Perry and Devon Franklin, schooled as the dignified old-school grandmother Renee on The Chi and engaged in verbal fisticuffs with Audra McDonald’s Mrs. Dorothy Scott as the formidable Mrs. Elizabeth Kirkland in season three of the multiple Emmy-nominated The Gilded Age.
Last year, she also touched down in Atlanta to film her part in the second season of the unorthodox whodunit series Diarra from Detroit, reprising her 2024 role as Vonda Brooks, a mother whose son Deonte went missing from a mall visit after she looked away briefly. Diarra puts her natural investigative skills as an elementary school teacher to work to find her new love connection whom she believes is that little boy that was kidnapped from the mall and has been kidnapped again as an adult now known as Chris.
