Chandra Wilson, We Celebrate your Amazingness!

Today, we explore the Amazing life of Mrs. Chandra Wilson~ {Dr. Miranda Bailey, of Grey's   Anatomy}!

Actress Chandra Wilson was born August 27, 1969, in Houston, Texas. She made her New York stage debut in 1991. She also began to land guest spots on a variety of prime-time television shows. She made her big-screen debut in the 1993 film Philadelphia. In 2005, she landed the breakthrough role she had been waiting for as Dr. Miranda Bailey on the wildly popular ABC prime-time show Grey's Anatomy.

Her mother, a postal worker, wanted to keep her daughter active, so she enrolled Chandra in a litany of after-school activities that would set the course for her show business career. By the age of five, Wilson was performing in musicals with Houston's Theatre Under the Stars company. 

She attended Houston's High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and continued on to New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, graduating with a BFA in drama in 1991.

She made her New York debut in a 1991 production of The Good Times Are Killing Me and won a Theater World Award for Outstanding Debut Performance. Her other early stage credits include off-Broadway productions of Paper Moon: The Musical and Little Shop of Horrors.

While she was making a name for herself on the New York stage, Wilson also began to land guest spots on a variety of prime-time television shows. She appeared on The Cosby Show (1989), Law & Order (1992) and CBS' Schoolbreak Special (1992). She made her big-screen debut alongside Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington in the highly acclaimed 1993 film Philadelphia. Despite receiving high praise for nearly all of her performances, however, Wilson struggled for many years to gain more prominent roles. For eight years, while she tried to break into major stardom, Wilson worked part-time as a teller at Deutsche Bank in order to make ends meet.

Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, Wilson continued to turn in memorable, if brief, performances on popular TV shows. She appeared on Third Watch (2001), Sex and the City (2002), The Sopranos (2004) and in sporadic episodes of Law And Order: SVU.

Then, in 2005, 15 years after she made her television debut on The Cosby Show, Wilson finally landed the breakthrough role she had been waiting for as Dr.Miranda Bailey on the wildly popular ABC sitcom Grey's Anatomy. The part of Dr. Bailey, supervisor to the hospital interns, had been written for a petite, Caucasian blonde, but Wilson, a full-figured African-American woman, gave such an impressive audition that the show's producers decided to give her the part.


Wilson was nominated for four consecutive Emmy Awards (2006-2009) and won four consecutive NAACP Image Awards (2007-2010) for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Series. She also won the 2008 People's Choice Award for Favorite Scene-Stealing Star. In 2009, while still starring on Grey's, Wilson took a brief hiatus from the show to return to Broadway as Mama Morton in a revival of Chicago.


The always-humble Wilson says that the only difference between her acting career now and her acting career a decade ago is that people actually recognize her on the street. ~
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