Viola Davis, an Oscar-nominated actress and star of the new series How to Get Away With Murder, recalled her impoverished childhood in an emotional speech, saying she went as far as to dive into maggot-infested garbage containers to rummage for food.
The 49-year-old, who has talked about her upbringing publicly before, made her comments on Friday at Variety's Power of Women luncheon, where she was honored along with other celebrities, such as Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Lopez, for her humanitarian efforts. Davis works with the Hunger Is campaign to raise awareness about hunger in the United States.
"Now I'm crying," she said, as she accepted her award. "I didn't expect to come here and cry. I expected to come and drink lots of Champagne."
"I didn't join the Hunger Is campaign to save the world. I didn't," she said. "I set out to save myself. You know, they say that you're never too old to have a happy childhood and although my childhood was filled with many happy memories it was also spent in abject poverty."
"I was one of the 17 million kids in this country who didn't know where the next meal was coming from and I did everything to get food," she added. "I've stolen the food, I've jumped in huge garbage bins with maggots for food, I have befriended people in the neighborhood who I knew had mothers who cooked three meals a day for food and I sacrificed a childhood for food and grew up in immense shame."
Davis was born in 1965 in South Carolina and grew up in Central Falls, Rhode Island, where currently, more than 30 percent of the some 19,000-large population lives below the poverty line—a figure that is more than twice the national average, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
During her speech, the actress said the only childhood photo of herself, which shows her as a little girl with a little ponytail.
"That's me. That's who I remember every time I wake up. She speaks to me, this little girl. She kinda guides me," Davis said, adding, jokingly, "Sometimes in not-so-good ways, you know, like with boyfriends and everything, she was really not good."
"I'm very honored to have this award, honestly, I didn't need it but I love it," she said. "And really, it is my honor to serve—you know, they say, 'To serve is to love,' and I think to serve is to heal, too, my life, you know, and to satisfy the little girl."
Davis began her on-screen acting career in the mid-'90s and appeared on shows such as Law & Order: SVU and United States of Tara and the 2008 movie Doubt before she starred in the 2011 film The Help. She received an Oscar nomination for her role of Aibileen Clark, a black maid employed by a rich white family in Mississippi in the '60s during the beginning stages of the civil rights movement. Davis also won a Tony award for her performance in the Broadway play King Hedley II in 2001.
How to Get Away With Murder , the actress' first major TV role in four years, premiered on ABC last month.
The actress made similar comments about her impoverished upbringing during a speech at the 2013 Safeway Foundation Gala. The group and the Entertainment Industry Foundation announced in June that they had raised more than $4.5 million in support of Hunger Is.
"You know childhood is the first thing that poverty takes away from a child and I know that because I was one of the children that was the one in five, I was the one in 17 million, I grew up in abject poverty in Central Falls, Rhode Island," she said then. "my mother had an eighth grade education, my father had a fifth grade education."
"I spent the majority of my childhood being raised in condemned buildings infested with rats," she said. "I was the child who went to bed hungry every single night. And what it motivated me to do, a child who had an enormous amount of intelligence and integrity and imagination, it encouraged me to steal food, it encouraged me to jump in dumpsters that were infested with maggots for food. It encouraged me to even befriend people who I knew had mothers who cooked them three meals a day, it encouraged me to befriend them so that I could go over to their house and have a meal."
Davis said she is "constantly motivated" by "that child," even while she's walking the red carpet, adding, "Hopefully in your minds, you can see her and you're constantly motivated by her too."