Acting
May 29, 1962
Chicago, Illinois, USA
Tonya Pinkins
Acting
Biography
Tonya Pinkins was born in Chicago, Illinois. She has four children. Her father was a police officer and insurance salesman and her mother is a former postal worker. She has two brothers, Eric Swoope and Thomas Swoope and a sister Tamera Swoope from whom she is estranged. She was interested in the arts from a young age. In high school, she studied acting at the Goodman Theatre Young People's Program. Aged 18, she briefly attended college and decided to pursue an acting career instead. She later returned to college, earning an undergraduate degree from Columbia College in Chicago, followed by graduate work at Carnegie Mellon's music theater program, and a year at California Western School of Law in San Diego. Pinkins is probably most admired for her stage work. She won a Tony Award for her performance as Sweet Anita in Jelly's Last Jam. She was nominated for her roles in Play On! and in Caroline, or Change, where she played the title role. Her additional Broadway credits include Merrily We Roll Along, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, The Wild Party, House of Flowers, Radio Golf, A Time To Kill and Holler If Ya Hear Me. Pinkins has performed in several Off Broadway productions, including the comic role of Mopsa, the Shepherdess, in The Winter's Tale produced by the Riverside Shakespeare Company at The Shakespeare Center in 1983. In 2011, Pinkins starred in the world premiere of Kirsten Greenidge’s Milk Like Sugar at La Jolla Playhouse, and received a 2012 Craig Noel nomination for Best featured Actress in a Play. She reprised her role in the Playwrights Horizons in the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, and garnered a 2012 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play. In 2012 Pinkins starred in Katori Hall's play Hurt Village, the gritty drama about life and change in a Memphis housing project made its world-premiere at Off-Broadway's Signature Theatre Company as part of the theatre's inaugural season. The play also Marsha Stephanie Blake, Ron Cephas Jones, Saycon Sengbloh, Lloyd Watts, Charlie Hudson III, Nicholas Christopher, Corey Hawkins, Ron Cephas Jones and Joaquina Kalukango. In 2014, Pinkins appeared in New Federal Theatre's revival of Ed Bullins' The Fabulous Miss Marie opposite Roscoe Orman; in the Broadway production of Holler If Ya Hear Me; and the world premiere of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' War at Yale Repertory. She has also had a prolific television career making guest appearances on such television shows as Army Wives, 24, Law & Order, The Cosby Show, Cold Case, Criminal Minds, and The Guardian among others. During the mid-1980s Pinkins created the role of Heather Dalton on the CBS soap, As the World Turns. In 1991 she was cast as Livia Frye in All My Children. Pinkins left All My Children in 1995 but returned to her role in 2003. She was later put on contract with the show from March 2004 until June 2006, when she was downgraded to recurring status. She has played Amala Motobo on the popular television show 24. She has appeared in several films in supporting roles, including Newlyweeds, Home, Fading Gigolo opposite Woody Allen, Enchanted, Premium, Romance & Cigarettes, Noah's Arc: Jumping The Broom and Above the Rim among others.
Feature Films (27)
Ironworker Nick lives with his wife, Kitty, and three daughters. When he meets a significantly younger woman, Tula, he starts an affair with her, much to the chagrin of his wife, and his life is thrown into upheaval. Kitty kicks Nick out of the house, and he is forced to make some difficult decisions.
Romance & Cigarettes
The true story of Virginia Christian, a 16-year-old African American girl accused of murder in the Jim Crow South.
An Act of Terror
A match made in stoner heaven turns into a love triangle gone awry when Lyle can't decide which matters most, Nina or Mary Jane.
Newlyweeds
A murder takes place in the shop of David Lyons, a deaf man who fails to hear the gunshot being fired. Outside, blind man Wally Karue hears the shot, but cannot see the perpetrator. Both are arrested, but escape to form an unlikely partnership. Being chased by both the law AND the original killers, can the pair work together to outwit them all?
See No Evil, Hear No Evil
Behind prison walls, corruption, sex and power make criminals out of the guards and heroes out of the guarded. For more than a decade, the lawless guards inside a maximum security women's prison have reigned with impunity - rape, sex for money and illegal favors have become the norm until one woman decides to battle the system. Leading a group of inmates on a risky life-or-death struggle for justice, a ten year silence is finally broken, exposing the twisted truth to the world and enabling the prisoners the freedom to live without fear.
Against Their Will
Television & Series (32)
In cases ripped from the headlines, police investigate serious and often deadly crimes, weighing the evidence and questioning the suspects until someone is taken into custody. The district attorney's office then builds a case to convict the perpetrator by proving the person guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Working together, these expert teams navigate all sides of the complex criminal justice system to make New York a safer place.
Law & Order
Deputy Police Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson transfers from Atlanta to LA to head up a special unit of the LAPD that handles sensitive, high-profile murder cases. Johnson's quirky personality and hard-nosed approach often rubs her colleagues the wrong way, but her reputation as one of the world's best interrogator eventually wins over even her toughest critics.
The Closer
Nick Fallin is a hotshot lawyer working at his father's ultrasuccessful Pittsburgh law firm. Unfortunately, the high life has gotten the best of Nick. Arrested for drug use, he's sentenced to do 1,500 hours of community service, somehow to be squeezed into his 24/7 cutthroat world of mergers, acquisitions and board meetings. Reluctantly, he's now The Guardian - a part-time child advocate at Legal Aid Services, where one case after another is an eye-opening instance of kids caught up in difficult circumstances.
The Guardian
The Cosby Show is an American television situation comedy starring Bill Cosby, which aired for eight seasons on NBC from September 20, 1984 until April 30, 1992. The show focuses on the Huxtable family, an upper middle-class African-American family living in Brooklyn, New York.
