On Sunday, Jennifer Hudson claimed a Tony Award for her work as co-producer on A Strange Loop, the Broadway play that took home the prize for Best New Musical. That checked off Hudson’s “T” on the EGOT journey, officially making her a member of the select group of entertainers to have have an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony sitting on the bookshelves at home.
Hudson got her Oscar for Dreamgirls back in 2007 and has two Grammys: one for Best R&B album and another for her work on The Color Purple. She later took home an Emmy for her producing work on the animated short Baba Yaga, and now she has a Tony, so there you go. She joins other EGOTers like John Legend, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Rita Moreno and Audrey Hepburn, but is only the second Black woman to make the cut (along with Whoopi Goldberg).
The term “EGOT” was popularized by Tracy Morgan’s 30 Rock character but was actually coined by Miami Vice star Philip Michael Thomas, who told reporters his goal was to go full EGOT within five years. He never got nominated for any of the necessary awards to do so, but the name stuck, which is its own sort of reward. Hudson is the seventeenth person to snag all four awards. Pretty impressive!
In 2021, Hudson sat down with RELEVANT Magazine to talk about how being raised in the Church played in her career. “Without it, ain’t no way in the world I would have been able to do this,” she said. “That’s what carried me through it. It brought me all the way through it because it’s not an easy thing to do or to want to do either.”
