Danielle Deadwyler

Danielle Deadwyler (born May 3, 1982) is an American actress. She began her career appearing on Atlanta stage, notably the 2009 production of For Colored Girls, before making her screen debut in the 2012 drama film A Cross to Bear. She appeared in the Oprah Winfrey Network primetime soap opera The Haves and the Have Nots (2015–2017), the Starz drama series P-Valley (2020), the HBO Max miniseries Station Eleven (2021–2022), and the Netflix miniseries From Scratch (2022). Deadwyler garnered critical acclaim for starring in the western film The Harder They Fall (2021) and the biopic Till (2022). Her portrayal of Mamie Till in the latter won her the Gotham Independent Film Award for Outstanding Lead Performance and National Board of Review Award for Breakthrough Performance. Deadwyler was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Southwest Atlanta. She is the daughter of a legal secretary and a railroad supervisor and has three siblings. She graduated from Grady High School (now Midtown High School) and then Spelman College before receiving a Master's of Arts in American Studies from Columbia University. In 2017, she earned a second master’s degree, in creative writing at Ashland University in Ohio.