Interviewee: Vanessa Williams
Interviewer: Kimberley Maus
Date: December 18, 2008

Vanessa Williams went down in history when she was crowned the first ever African-American Miss America. However, she was stripped of the title when nude pictures of her from Penthouse emerged afterwards.

Snagging a recording contract thereafter, Vanessa Williams then posted some chart toppers in the US, including “Love Is” from the Beverly Hills 90210 soundtrack. But it was “Save the Best for Last,” which catapulted her to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. The single, which was lifted from her second studio album The Comfort Zone, held on the top spot for five weeks in 1992. The album itself sold three million copies in the US and over two million elsewhere.

Vanessa Williams, who has won multiple NAACP Image Awards and New York Music Awards, has been nominated for fifteen Grammy Awards. The nominations started with her debut album The Right Stuff in 1988. Eventually she won for her songwriters a Grammy Award for “Colors of the Wind,” the soundtrack of Walt Disney’s 1995 animated feature, Pocahontas. “Colors of the Wind” eventually procured an Oscar and Golden Globe for outstanding song from a motion picture.

Later on she segued into a lucrative career as a film actress, with standout roles in Erasure, Soul Food, Hoodlum, Dance with Me, and Shaft. She has also mastered the craft of theater acting with acclaimed performances in Kiss of the Spider Woman and Into the Woods, which won a Tony Award. By the start of the 2000s however, Williams’ career as an entertainer started to wane.

In 2006, Vanessa Williams was cast as a villain in the television hit Ugly Betty, a remake of the Mexican soap Betty La Fea. Her career has been steadily reinvigorated since then.