Phylicia Rashad (born June 19, 1948, Houston, Texas, U.S.) is an American actress who first gained fame for her work in the television series The Cosby Show (1984–92) and later became the first African American woman to win (2004) a Tony Award for best actress; she won the honour for her performance in the play A Raisin in the Sun.
Allen was the second of four children born to Andrew Arthur Allen, a dentist, and Vivian Ayers Allen, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet. Her elder brother, Andrew Arthur (“Tex”) Allen, Jr., went on to become a jazz musician, and her sister, Debbie Allen, was a dancer, actress, and television producer and director. In 1970 she graduated from Howard University, Washington, D.C., with a B.F.A. in theatre. Soon thereafter she found work with the Negro Ensemble Company in New York City. Allen made her first appearance on Broadway in 1972 and had minor roles in the hit musicals The Wiz (1975) and Dreamgirls (1981) before making the transition to television.
In 1982 Allen landed a regular role on the daytime soap opera One Life to Live. Two years later comedian Bill Cosby chose her for the role of his wife, attorney Clair Huxtable, in the groundbreaking situation comedy The Cosby Show, which ran from 1984 to 1992. After marrying (1985) sports broadcaster Ahmad Rashad, she began using his surname professionally (the couple divorced in 2001). Her role as Clair—graceful but assertive, dignified but devoted—became a defining one for Rashad and earned her two Emmy Award nominations. She also played Cosby’s wife in the series Cosby (1996–2000).
During the 1990s and early 2000s, Rashad returned to the stage while continuing to work steadily on television. Her portrayal of the semi-mythical Aunt Ester in August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean (2003) in productions in Los Angeles and on Broadway won enthusiastic praise. In 2004 she starred as Lena Younger, the matriarch of a struggling African American family in 1950s Chicago, in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. In addition to earning a Tony Award for best actress, Rashad also received a 2004 Drama Desk Award. She later starred in a television adaptation (2008) of the play.
In 2007 Rashad made her directorial debut at the helm of the Seattle Repertory Theatre’s production of Gem of the Ocean. The following year she again made history on Broadway when Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened with its first all-Black cast. With costar James Earl Jones, Rashad—in the role of Big Mama—anchored the production, which set Williams’s tale of a wealthy Southern planter’s morally foundering family at a remove from its original Jim Crow-era time frame to accommodate the African American cast. In 2009 she portrayed a drug-addicted matriarch in the Broadway production of Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County. Rashad later directed revivals of several plays by August Wilson. These included a 2013 production of Fences in New Haven, Connecticut, and a 2016 staging of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in Los Angeles. In 2022 Rashad returned to Broadway, appearing in Skeleton Crew, about four autoworkers in Detroit during the 2007–08 financial crisis. For her performance, Rashad received a Tony Award for best featured actress in a play.
Rashad’s appearances on the silver screen were somewhat sporadic. In 2010 she performed in the romantic comedy Just Wright and the mental-illness tale Frankie & Alice as well as the ensemble drama For Colored Girls, Tyler Perry’s film adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s 1975 theatre piece For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf. Rashad later appeared in Perry’s romantic drama Good Deeds (2012) and in a TV movie adaptation (2012) of the play Steel Magnolias. As with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the latter work featured a predominantly African American cast, in contrast to its original stage and film productions.
In 2013 Rashad played the boss of a surgeon afflicted with a Jekyll-and-Hyde-like personality disorder in the TV series Do No Harm. She later had recurring roles in Empire and This Is Us; her work in the latter series earned her two Emmy nominations. She was also cast as the title character’s teacher in the TV series David Makes Man (2019– ). In addition, Rashad continued to appear in movies, notably portraying the widow of boxer Rocky Balboa’s friend (and former opponent) Apollo Creed in the Rocky (1976) sequels Creed (2015) and Creed II (2018). In 2020 she appeared in Perry’s crime drama A Fall from Grace and the horror film Black Box. That year she lent her voice to Pixar’s Soul. Rashad later had a supporting role in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s tick, tick…BOOM! (2021).