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Since her first, award-winning performance in the off-Broadway play “Ruined,” the actress and daughter of famed actress Phylicia Rashad and former football star-turned-tv anchor Ahmad Rashad has carved her own path in and out of the entertainment industry. She is a four-time Tony-Award nominee, one of the stars of the critically-acclaimed Showtime series, “Billions” as well as a beloved favorite among her fans.
But what drives this beautiful 33-year-old actress?
“I’m a Sagittarius,” she laughs. [Sagittarius’] like information and we like to learn new things. I’m about expansion. A lot of moments of growth came to me because of questions that came up — not because somebody told me that I should do this or think this way, but [because] a question was posed. And by me having to try and contemplate that question, that’s what led me to a new place of growth, because I was able to find it for myself.”
Daughter to stage and screen vet Phylicia Rashad (Clair Huxtable on “The Cosby Show” and the first black woman to win a Tony for best actress in a play in 2004), she grew up watching her mother at work and knew from a very early age the commitment that a life in acting demanded.
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“[My mother] took me everywhere when I was little, so I got to witness the work,” she says. “All of the effects of the work that you do, the red carpets, the glitz and the glam and the shows—those are super fun, don’t get me wrong, but I would be in rehearsal watching her start from a table read and then I would watch all the way up to when she’s onstage opening night. It really affected my work ethic at a young age. It wasn’t just all fun.”
Even though her mom gave her space to dream and become anything that she wanted to be, there was already a seed of acting planted in Condola that began to grow at a young age.
“It was never a question of becoming an actor. I always knew early that I wanted to become an actor, since I watched my mom in rehearsal. It was like, Oh I can’t wait to do that! It was something that became a part of me, but I didn’t train in it. In terms of what I actually was doing, I was training as a musician. My mom gave me piano lessons at the age of three. And so from then on, that was my after-school thing, that was my discipline. I played classical piano for about 10 years. Sometimes our industry can be very hard for children and they come out a little bit confused and disjointed. And my mother really wanted me to have [a normal childhood].
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“I think the biggest thing that I always learn from my mother is acting can be about pretending or it can be about finding the truth,” she says. “I choose to find the truth in every character. As long as you never go astray from that, you’ve got it. Acting, while it may not always feel easy, is very simple. It’s not complex. It can be hard to do, the same way meditating can be hard to do, but it’s very simple.”
Don’t think that Condola is all about drama and intense acting scenes. She has a softer, fun side to her as well.
“Growing up, I was a fantasy fiction geek, she told Shondaland.com. “That is what nurtured my imagination. When you have a nurtured imagination, it does…
… help you in your own walk of life, because you can imagine great things for yourself. When I was growing up, I’d see a lot of fantasy films and I didn’t see a lot of people [who] looked like me. I was fortunate enough — it’s the way that my mother raised me — [that] I never felt less than anybody growing up. So I remember feeling like, “I don’t see anybody like me, but that’s OK, I’m still gonna watch it, [and] one day there’s gonna be people like me in these things.”
“Why not? Why not have magic? We all come from many different cultures, but if we’re gonna trace it all the way back, there’s a lot of magic, there’s a lot of mysticism, there’s a lot of things that are part of our history. I feel this strongly as a black American. I’ve done my ancestry DNA so I know where and what countries in Africa that my ancestors came from, but because of slavery, I do feel that culturally, there’s a disconnect. I feel like [we’ve lost] a sense of our own magic. What a pity. Why [is it that] other cultures can have all of these magical stories and we’re not allowed to have them?”
“Black Panther served me my life,” she continued. “I was living my full fantasy life, and I was just like, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ Because now there’s a young child out there who can look at that and say, ‘I’m a superhero, I can be a superhero.’ As a kid, you know you have magic in you. That’s important.
(Photo credit: IndieWire.com)
Debbie Allen and Phylicia Rashad have had a lot of success in their own right. Phylicia won a Tony on Broadway, Debbie was a choreographer to the stars. Phylicia landed an iconic role as Clair Huxtable on The Cosby Show and Debbie was executive producer on the spin-off hit show, A Different World. Both graduated from Howard University, but many forget that the two are sister. And not only sisters, they’re super close and some of the most loving, realest sisters around.
Best known as the no-nonsense dance teacher on Fame, Debbie started off in showbiz before her big sister. She had won roles on Broadway with in 1973’s Raisin, the musical version of A Raisin in the Sun, and Anita in the 1980 West Side Story revival. Phylicia then followed her younger sister to the television as the ambitious publicist Courtney Wright on ABC’s One Life to Live and was an understudy for Sheryl Lee Ralph in Dreamgirls before landing on The Cosby Show.
It doesn’t matter what the other is doing, the two sisters are super proud of each other. There’s no jealousy here. “I am probably Deborah’s most ardent admirer, and she is undoubtedly mine,” says Phylicia, who actually helped Debbie nab her first big break: Turning down a role in Raisin in the Sun because she was pregnant, Phylicia recommended her sister. Says she, “Of course Debbie got a job in the chorus, and later became Beneatha, and, honey, that was it.”
The two even decided to lose weight together.
“She’s pretty when she’s thin and when she’s overweight,” Allen said of her sister. “But you know, I hugged her one time. I said, ‘Come on, let’s go. Come on. I’ll go with you. Let’s go. We got to go down 25 pounds.’
Only a sister can say that to you, am I right?
“I’ve always said, ‘If you can stand in the mirror naked and you can look at it, then maybe someone else can too,'” Allen continued, laughing. “But if you can’t stand to look at it, honey, child, run. Run, run to Jenny Craig, honey! Get on your tennis shoes and get your butt over there. Don’t take any time!”
(Photo credit: Pinterest)
Rashad took the advice, and once she signed on as a pitch woman for the diet company, she dropped five pounds in the first week — Thanksgiving week no less.
“That’s why I did it,” Rashad explained to People. “I said, ‘No, if I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it right now, in this week. I ate everything…
… I wanted to eat. I ate less of it.”
Growing up in Houston, Phylicia, Debbie and their older brother, Tex, (now a New York jazz musician) became a close-knit band under their mom’s influence. Divorced from her dentist husband when the kids were young, mom Vivian Ayers-Allen was an art gallery owner and published poet. She taught her children to love each other and the finer things in life, such as music. “Ellington, Sarah Vaughan and Basie were like good friends to us,” Phylicia remembers. “I used to sing Tex and Debbie to sleep every night with jazz tunes.”
At school, the sisters joined the glee club, the majorette squad and the orchestra. (Phylicia played viola, and the diminutive Debbie stretched herself to cope with the bass fiddle.) “Our family has this achievement syndrome,” Phylicia says. “Debbie and I used to fight over socks and hairpins—you know, the essentials in life. We had tiffs. But when the chips were down, we were there for each other.”
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