Viola Davis celebrates her 55th birthday by buying South Carolina plantation home she was born in

Viola Davis is looking back on her humble beginnings as she celebrates her 55th birthday.

The Academy Award-winner showed how far she’s come while revealing her latest real estate purchase: the very South Carolina home she was born in in 1965.

The How To Get Away With Murder talent shared a photo of the modest house to her social media, telling fans: ‘The above is the house where I was born August 11, 1965. It is the birthplace of my story. Today on my 55th year of life….I own it….all of it.’

She continued with the Cherokee birth blessing, writing: ‘May you live long enough to know why you were born.’

Not only did Viola snag the home her grandma used to live in but she purchased the land surrounding it as well.

The bare-bones residence is said to previously been part of a plantation, meaning the history of the property runs deep and dark.

Back in 2016, Viola talked about her birthplace with Entertainment Weekly.

While she revealed she wasn’t there long, the actress said her simple start was integral to her understanding of herself and her family.

‘I wasn’t on it long, because I was the fifth child, and so we moved soon after I was born,’ she explained. ‘I mean, I went back to visit briefly but still not aware of the history. I think I read one slave narrative of someone who was on that plantation which was horrific.

‘160 acres of land, and my grandfather was a sharecropper. Most of my uncles and cousins, they’re farmers. That’s the choice that they had,’ she explained.

The history of sharecropping in America has deep ties to slavery. While sharecroppers were emancipated men and women during the post-slavery Reconstruction era, they were all but bound to the landowners (often former plantation owners) by economic constraints.

Her grandparent’s generation survived on what they could, with Viola saying: ‘My grandmother’s house was a one room shack. I have a picture of it on my phone because I think it’s a beautiful picture.’

Things weren’t glamorous for the family, who had ‘no running water’ or bathroom during that time. 

‘It’s just an outhouse,’ she said. ‘But my mom says that the day I was born, all of my aunts and uncles were in the house, she said, everyone was drinking and laughing, and having fun. She said she ate a sardine, mustard, onion, tomato sandwich after I was born.’

‘I love that story,’ Davis went on. ‘It’s a great story to me. It’s a great story of celebration in the midst of what you would feel is a decimated environment, but you could see the joy and the life that can come out of that, because it’s not always about things, you know.’ 

Viola was eventually able to leave South Carolina, starting her acting career with theater in Rhode Island.

Her talent was enough to earn her a spot at the revered Juilliard School, which she graduated from in 1993. 

She earned a Tony for her role as Tonya in August Wilson’s King Hedley II in 2001, but it took several more years for her to break into film.

After a string of minor TV and film roles, Viola earned her first Oscar nomination for 2008’s Doubt. She was nominated for The Help in 2011. Then in 2016, she would take home the Best Actress honor for The Fences.

Viola then made her mark in the TV world when she took the role of lawyer Annalise Keating in the Shonda Rimes-created drama How to Get Away with Murder. 

She became the first black woman to win the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series after taking home the 2015 honor.

Viola currently has several projects in the works, included an untitled Harriet Tubman film and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, a film about ‘Mother of Blue’ Ma Rainey.