Rashad, Phylicia Ayers-Allen

Source:

 African American National Biography

Rashad, Phylicia Ayers-Allen

(19 June 1948– ),

actress, singer, was born Phylicia Ayers-Allen in Houston, Texas, the second-oldest child of Dr. Andrew Arthur Allen, a dentist, and Dr. Vivian Elizabeth (Ayers) Allen, a poet and educator. Her father is of Cherokee descent; her mother, an African American, won a Pulitzer Prize nomination for her first published work, Spice of Dawns. Ayers-Allen's siblings, like their mother, embraced the arts; her older brother Andrew Arthur “Tex” Allen Jr. became a jazz musician; her younger sister Debbie Allen is an actor, choreographer, and director who won an Emmy Award for her role on the television series Fame; her youngest brother Hugh Allen is a real estate banker. In the 1950s Ayers-Allen moved with her family to Mexico, where she learned to speak Spanish fluently. Ayers-Allen attended Jack Yates Senior High School in her hometown and at the same time began studying at the Merry-Go-Round Theater, a youth training program, sponsored by the Alley Theater, also in Houston. Upon graduating she attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she joined Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated, the first African American sorority in the United States. Ayers-Allen was still an undergraduate when she appeared in the off-Broadway production, Miss Weaver (1968); and in 1970, when she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Howard, she relocated to New York City for a career in theater.

Ayers-Allen joined the Negro Ensemble Company, a sounding board and boot camp for many African American actors—Sherman Hemsley, Angela Bassett, and Denzel Washington among them—and successfully achieved a number of roles in New York. During this period she married William Lancelot Bowles Jr., a dentist, on 13 May 1972. Three years later, in 1975, they were divorced. Ayers-Allen continued her theater life as a Munchkin in the Tony Award winning musical production of The Wiz, in which she was also an understudy to the two lead actresses, the singers Stephanie Mills and Dee Dee Bridgewater as Dorothy and Glinda the Good Witch, respectively. Ayers-Allen married a second time on 28 April 1978, to Victor Willis, a lead singer for the Village People. During the same year she performed a disco biography of Josephine Baker, Josephine Superstar, produced by her husband; they divorced two years later. In 1981 Ayers-Allen joined the original cast of another Tony Award–winning musical, Dreamgirls, as an understudy to Sheryl Lee Ralph, who played Deena. Ayers-Allen made her television debut in 1983 as the attorney Courtney Wright on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live.

In 1984 the veteran comedian and actor Bill Cosby invited Ayers-Allen to portray the role of his television wife, the attorney Clair Olivia Hanks Huxtable, on NBCs groundbreaking sitcom The Cosby Show. The Huxtable children were portrayed by the actors Malcolm Jamal-Warner, Lisa Bonet, Keisha Knight-Pulliam, Tempest Blesdoe, and Sabrina Lebeauf. The Huxtables presented for the world a portrait of a solidly middle-class African American family without the dysfunctions or stereotypes previously portrayed on television. Ayers-Allen was hailed as the quintessential matriarch and professional female role model for her portrayal of Clair, and received two People's Choice Awards (1985, 1989), one NAACP Image Award (1984), and two Emmy nominations.

During the period of her Cosby Show success, Ahmad Rashad, the former NFL wide receiver turned sportscaster, proposed to Ayers-Allen live on the pregame show for the nationally televised Thanksgiving Day football game, November 1985; unannounced, she arrived at the studio and tearfully accepted his proposal on national television. The couple was married on 14 December 1985, with Debbie Allen standing as her maid of honor and O. J. Simpson the former NFL running back, spokesman, and actor as the best man. Ayers-Allen adopted her third husband's last name. In 1992 The Cosby Show, ended its historic television run.

Rashad starred in the film Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored, directed by Tim Reid and also starring Al Freeman Jr. and Leon. In 1996 Cosby invited her to portray Ruth Lucas, the wife of his character on the CBS sitcom Cosby. For her role on Cosby she won an NAACP Image Award (1997), a Satellite Award (1999), and a TV Guide Award (2000). Cosby aired for the last time in 2000, and that same year Cosby cast Rashad on his animated television series Little Bill, as the voice of Bill's mother. Her marriage to Ahmad Rashad ended in 2001, and Little Bill ended the following year.

Theater always remained a staple in Rashad's professional career among her appearances are Jelly's Last Jam (1992–1993), The Pearl Cleage production of Blues for an Alabama Sky (1996), The Vagina Monologues (1999, 2003), Helen (2002), and from 26 April 2004 through 11 July 2004 she appeared as the matriarch Lena Younger in Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun; twenty years earlier, in the same play, she had portrayed the young, ambitious Ruth. She performed opposite the music mogul Sean “Puffy” Combs in his theater debut for a fifteen- week run that earned Rashad the Drama Desk Award and the Tony Award for Best Actress, the first African American woman to win the title. Even more, the play became the second-highest-grossing production in Broadway history. From 6 December 2004 to 6 February 2005 Rashad portrayed Aunt Ester in the August Wilson play Gem of the Ocean; for her performance she received a Tony Award nomination; she directed the play in 2007 for the Seattle Repertory Theater.

A Raisin in the Sun was adapted for television in 2008; Rashad portrayed Lena Younger opposite her 2004 Broadway cast including Combs, Sanna Lathan, and Audra McDonald. She earned the 2009 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actress in a Television Movie, Mini-Series, or Dramatic Special for her performance. In 2008 Rashad starred on Broadway in an all–African American production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by her sister Debbie Allen, opposite James Earl Jones; Terrance Howard, a film actor making his Broadway debut; and Anika Noni Rose, who played the role of the first African American Disney princess.

Rashad received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Brown University in 2005 and from Carnegie Mellon University in 2009. She is on the board of directors for the largest regional theater in the southeastern Unites States, the Alliance Theater Company in Atlanta, Georgia. Rashad has narrated several children's books including Ellington Was Not a Street (2005) and Sahara Special (2006); and literature for young adults. With her sister she has a production company, D.A.D, an acronym for Doctor Allen's Daughters.

Rashad has two children, William Lancelot Bowles III, born in 1973, and Condola Phylea, born in 1986.

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