Singer, actress, and producer Jennifer Hudson is now officially part of the illustrious EGOT club. Her last needed award to complete the honor was a Tony Award and on Sunday, June 12, she emerged victorious for having produced Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop.
To achieve the status marked by the acronym EGOT, a star must win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony Award. At the 75th annual Tony Awards that happened at Radio City Music Hall in New York, Hudson became the 17th person in history to have earned this honor. The other 16 stars who have managed to win all four awards are Richard Rodgers, Helen Hayes, Rita Moreno, John Gielgud, Audrey Hepburn, Marvin Hamlisch, Jonathan Tunick, Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols, Whoopi Goldberg, Scott Rudin, Robert Lopez, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Tim Rice, and John Legend. Hudson is now the second black woman, the fifth woman overall, to have accomplished this feat after Goldberg, who made the list back in the early 2000s.
As the producer of A Strange Loop, Hudson took home the Broadway honor after the musical won Best Musical. Her first win towards an EGOT was in 2007 when she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress as Effie White in Dreamgirls. Hudson won two Grammys thereafter, with eight nominations in total, the first of which for her debut R&B album, and the second which came years later in 2017 when The Color Purple, a play in which she starred, won Best Musical Theatre Album. Her Daytime Emmy Award came last year for her role as an executive producer of Baobab Studios’ immersive VR interactive animation Baba Yaga.
Jackson’s A Strange Loop first premiered off-Broadway in 2019. The musical is centered around a young queer black man named Usher who is an usher at a Broadway show and is in the process of writing a play about a young queer black man named Usher who is an usher at a Broadway show. According to the New York Times, on Sunday, while introducing a performance of A Strange Loop, Hudson stated: “This brilliant, funny masterpiece exposes the heart and soul of a young artist struggling with his desires, identity and instincts he both loves and hates.” A Strange Loop had over 35 producers, which includes Alan Cumming, Ilana Glazer, Don Cheadle, Mindy Kaling, and Billy Porter. The musical got 11 nominations in total.
Check out all of this year’s Tony Awards nominees here.