10 Actors Who Perfected Roles YEARS Before The Movie
1. Denzel Washington & Viola Davis Won Tony Awards For The Stage Version Six Years Earlier - Fences
There's a distinguished club of just nine actors who have originated a role on the stage, won a Tony Award for it, translated the role to the big screen and repeated that success with an Oscar win.
More often than not those actors who managed to win Tonys and Oscars for the same performance struck while the iron was hot, and appeared in a movie based on the theatre production just a couple of years later.
But that wasn't quite the case with Fences, which began life as a 1985 play and was revived for Broadway in 2010, where Denzel Washington and Viola Davis both won Tony Awards for their performances as an embattled married couple.
Six years later in 2016 Fences was adapted into a film, directed by Washington himself while he and Davis both reprised their respective roles.
Each received Oscar nominations in the process, and Davis went on to win the Best Supporting Actress award for her sublime work.
While there are fundamental differences between a stage and screen performance, much like Olivier's reprise of Hamlet they clearly had this thing on lock before even a frame of film had been shot.