Tulsa-raised actress Alfre Woodard is blessed with something sort of like the Midas touch.
Everything she touches doesn’t necessarily turn into gold.
But she delivers gold in every performance.
Proof?
Woodard made history at the 2013 Emmy Awards when she earned a 17th nomination for 16 different roles. That’s a different trick than riding one character in one series to repeated nominations.
Woodard owns four Emmy wins amid her 17 nominations, plus a Daytime Emmy nomination for her work in a children’s special. A winner of eight NAACP Image Awards, three SAG Awards and one Golden Globe Award, Woodard was ranked as one of the 25 greatest actors of the 21st century (so far) by the New York Times in 2020.
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It’s all a testimony to what you can achieve if you are willing to chase a dream — and eat beans?
Woodard, a 1970 alum of Bishop Kelley High School, returned to her hometown April 18 to attend the Greenwood Cultural Center’s Legacy Award Dinner. She presented the 2024 Legacy Award to the Osage Nation.
Woodard sat for an interview in an office at the Greenwood Cultural Center prior to the awards dinner. Among questions: She was asked who her “champion” was as she pursued an acting career.
“Myself,” she said, adding that she knew what she wanted. “I was always taught just do whatever you want. My father would always say ‘You can do any damn thing that you set your mind to.’”
Woodard recalled breaking the news to her father that she did not intend to study pre-law at Boston University. Instead, she was going to study acting.
“I was kind of like trembling when I said it,” she said.
“And he looked at me and he said, ‘Babe, I didn’t even know they gave degrees in something like that.’ I said, ‘Yeah, they do at the university I’m going to go to.’ He said, ‘You know, you’re not going to be able to keep yourself the way I’ve been keeping you.’ I said, ‘I know.’ He goes, ‘You might end up eating beans the rest of your life.’ And I hated beans then. And I said, ‘I’m ready to eat beans, Daddy.’ And that’s when he looked at me and said, ‘Babe, you can do anything you set your mind to.’ He said, ‘Me and your mama got your back.’”
Early days
As a youth, was there one specific thing Woodard saw on a TV screen or a movie screen that made her want to be on the screen? She said that never crossed her mind until she was at Bishop Kelley. She name-dropped Brother Patrick O’Brien, who “taught us all kinds of things,” including creative writing.
“He would shut down the school once a month and just bus the whole school — you know, 700 kids — to the Southroads Mall Cinema,” Woodard said. “And he would show us whatever film he was ‘on’ about. So we were watching the films that people see in film school — ‘Citizen Kane,’ ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,’ ‘Sundays and Cybele,’ which is the one that really ‘took’ me.”
Woodard recalled that the students’ initial reaction was “Oh, we’re going to the movies!”
“But then we’d get there and there would be subtitles, and we’d go, ‘This is not a movie. This is a lesson.’ But you find yourself sitting there in the dark, sucking on Twizzlers, getting highly emotional about a middle-aged Frenchman and a 4-year-old orphan girl.”
Woodard said that was happening at the same time that Sister Rachel Ann Graham was recruiting students to be in school plays. She said they were doing plays like Peter Weiss’ “The Investigation” and “The House of Bernarda Alba.”
Elaborating on what led to her to want to be an actress, Woodard said she realized the moving image was — and still is — one of the most powerful tools human beings have at their disposal.
Adding time period context, Woodard said this: “I graduated in ’70, and everybody that was saying the things that we believed and that we were talking about in terms of the gospel and the good news and brotherhood and all that, everybody who was talking about that was getting assassinated. And we were that first generation that had to say, wait, you can assassinate a president? Or a person that says we are all one? Or we are equal? Or expresses compassion and says to look out for your neighbor takes a bullet? We lost Bobby (Kennedy) and Martin (Luther King Jr.) and Malcolm (X) and Medgar (Evers).
“So it was that time where my generation — we call it the time of man. You’re looking for ways to — you really thought you could save the world. And when I was so affected by the moving image and storytelling, I thought ‘This is what we’ll do. We’ll commandeer the airwaves and tell stories, and stories can change people’s perspectives and change people’s movements.’ So that’s how it started.”
Many people may “think” they can act. Woodard said she knew she could act the very first moment she did it.
“You know why? I was kind of an odd child,” she said.
“But I wasn’t one of those odd ones that gets ostracized and kind of hides. I was odd and out loud and in the mix of things. That’s a lesson for middle school kids. Wave that freak flag, you know?”
Woodard said she felt like she had been walking around on dry land doing the breaststroke all her life. Woodard, talking about how others might have talked about her, said, “Yeah, Woodard. She’s kind of wild.”
“But I felt like when I started (acting), I remember saying to Sister Teresa (Cummins) and Sister Rachel Ann, I said, ‘I couldn’t possibly stand up in front of somebody and pretend to be somebody else.’” Woodard said.
“That was a thing. I was a student leader. I had been a cheerleader. ... It was the whole thing of pretending to be somebody else. But I felt like when I did that, when I stood up to tell the story of another human being, that you have to get yourself out of the way because it’s not about you. It’s not about your opinions. It’s not how you look on the world. It is letting that voice come forward, to honor the fact of their life or their point of view — even a villain.”
Call it a light bulb moment.
“So when I did that, I felt like that crazy breaststroke I was doing on dry land, it felt like somebody just tipped me into the water,” she said. “And that stroke suddenly felt like home. It felt like this is the most freedom I’d ever felt in my life. And I was just like, OK. That was oxygen. I want to keep breathing that way. I want to keep moving that way. And so I realized I had a calling for it.”
Oklahoma’s Emmy queen
Woodard realized raw talent wasn’t enough. She needed training to transform her talent into a skill. Actors must be able to deliver, regardless of the circumstances or situation, so she looked into places (including Boston University) where she could get the necessary training.
Fourteen years after graduating from Bishop Kelley, Woodard was at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles for the 56th Academy Awards. She earned a best supporting actress nomination for her work in “Cross Creek.” Other nominees that year: Linda Hunt (who won for “The Year of Living Dangerously”), Cher (“Silkwood”), Glenn Close (“The Big Chill”) and Amy Irving (“Yentl”).
Woodard’s Oscar nomination preceded her slew of Emmy nominations. Oklahoma’s Emmy queen (no Oklahoma actress has more nominations) has reason to come back because her siblings are here. She said her brother, sister and sister-in-law are educators and advocates for children.
“They’re the ones that would take their paychecks and spend it on school supplies because they’d say ‘The kids don’t know that the legislature didn’t give us any books. I’m the one standing here, so I’ll do it.’ I’m just so proud of them.”
Woodard then mentioned Frances Jordan-Rakestraw, executive director of the Greenwood Cultural Center. Woodard complimented Jordan-Rakestraw for creating a profound sense of community for all the people that come to the center.
“She has gotten people that didn’t even know they had a place in the center to be sustaining supporters, and they do so much with young people,” Woodard said. “People have weddings and birthdays and colloques and all sorts of things at the center. So I come back to Tulsa a lot because of my siblings and she is as close as a sibling. They have been very active in carrying on the tradition of north Tulsa.”
Addressing the audience at the Legacy Awards Dinner, Woodard said she was thrilled when her Greenwood Cultural Center Family asked her to take part in the Legacy Celebration again “because I believe deeply in their vital mission to do right by the people who came before us.”
The mission of the Greenwood Cultural Center is to preserve and promote the proud history and future of the African American community and the historic Greenwood District. A “vision” statement on the Greenwood Cultural Center’s website said the center envisions Tulsa as a community that celebrates and promotes the extraordinary heritage, history and legacy of African Americans and the Greenwood District and is a model of multiculturalism at its best.
“We are so excited that Alfre came back home once again to present the GCC Legacy Award to the Osage Nation,” Jordan-Rakestraw said. “Her comments about the history and heritage of the Osage Nation were heartfelt. ... The performance of the Osage Singers was outstanding. It was a beautiful evening.”
Said Woodard at the event: “I embrace the Greenwood Cultural Center’s commitment to calling all the families into fellowship, their dedication to creating community as we gather on the very spot where dreams were once set afire. The center now calls us to ignite and manifest new visions of how intrinsically connected we are on this earth and how we can move in that awareness.”
Connected? When talking about her siblings and Jordan-Rakestraw during the sit-down interview, Woodard shared this recollection: “My father would always say ‘If anybody around you is hungry, if anybody around you can’t read, if anybody around you doesn’t feel safe, then you cannot rest.’ We had a lot of love and support and creature comforts. He said ‘Just because you are comfortable, that’s not the end of the story. The continuation of the story is how are your neighbors across town — across the world even?’ So I look up to them and I’m inspired by them.”