Viola Davis

Grew up in Central Falls, Rhode Island, in a condemned building with no working plumbing, hunting for food in bins, and has described bedwetting and rats in detail that most memoirs would soften.

Finding Me covers that, then Juilliard, then decades of being told she was too dark and too old, and the specific fury of accepting an award for playing a maid in The Help, a role she has since said publicly she regrets.

She is one of very few people to hold an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony. The book is not a triumph narrative; the anger is still in it.