Wanda Sykes is an American actress and a stand-up comedian. She has made several appearances in film and TV.
Let’s find out some trivia and facts about the actress.
- Her full name is Wanda Yvette Sykes
- She born March 7, 1964
- She is an American actress, stand-up comedian, and writer
- She was first recognized for her work as a writer on The Chris Rock Show
- For her work she won a Primetime Emmy Award in 1999
- In 2004, Entertainment Weekly named Sykes as one of the 25 funniest people in America
- She is also known for her roles on CBS’ The New Adventures of Old Christine (2006–10), HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm (2001–present), and ABC’s Black-ish (2015–present)
- She currently stars in the Netflix original series The Upshaws
- The series premiered on May 12, 2021, with Kim Fields and Mike Epps
- She has appeared in the HBO Max comedy series The Other Two
- As well as playing Allegra Durado, a new, powerful, and “messy”-brained partner in a legal firm on Paramount+’s acclaimed The Good Fight
- Aside from her television appearances, Sykes has also had a career in film, appearing in Monster-in-Law (2005), My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006), Evan Almighty (2007) and License to Wed (2007)
- As well as voicing characters in animated films such as Over the Hedge (2006), Barnyard (2006), Brother Bear 2 (2006), Rio (2011), Ice Age: Continental Drift (2012), Ice Age: Collision Course (2016) and UglyDolls (2019)
- Wanda Sykes was born in Portsmouth, Virginia
- Her family moved to Maryland when she was in third grade
- Her mother, Marion Louise, worked as a banker
- And her father, Harry Ellsworth Sykes, was a U.S. Army colonel employed at the Pentagon
- She has an older brother, Harry
- Sykes’s family history was researched for an episode of the 2012 PBS genealogy program Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates Jr
- Her ancestry was traced back to a 1683 court case involving her ancestor, Elizabeth Banks, a free white woman and indentured servant, who gave birth to a biracial child, Mary Banks, fathered by a slave, who inherited her mother’s free status
- According to historian Ira Berlin, a specialist in the history of American slavery, the Sykes family history is “the only such case that I know of in which it is possible to trace a black family rooted in freedom from the late 17th century to the present”
- Sykes attended Arundel High School in Gambrills, Maryland
- She went on to graduate from Hampton University
- There she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in marketing
- She became a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha
- After college, her first job was as a contracting specialist at the National Security Agency
- There she worked for five years
- Wanda Sykes was married to record producer Dave Hall from 1991 to 1998
- In November 2008, she publicly came out as a lesbian while at a same-sex marriage rally in Las Vegas regarding Proposition 8
- A month earlier, Sykes married her wife Alex Niedbalski, a French woman
- They met in 2006
- The couple also became parents in April 2009
- Then Niedbalski gave birth to a pair of fraternal twins, a daughter and a son, named Olivia and Lucas
- Sykes only came out to her conservative mother Marion and father Harry when she was 40
- They both initially had difficulty accepting her homosexuality
- They declined to attend her wedding with Alex
- This led to a brief period of estrangement, they have since reconciled with Sykes
- During a September 19, 2011, appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Sykes announced that she had been diagnosed earlier in the year with ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS)
- Although DCIS is a non-invasive “stage zero breast cancer”, Sykes had elected to have a bilateral mastectomy in order to lower her chances of getting breast cancer
- Sykes splits time between Media, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia and Cherry Grove, New York
- Sykes publicly expressed being devastated when California voters passed state Proposition 8
- She has continued to be active in same-sex marriage issues hosting events and emceeing fundraisers
- She has also worked with PETA on promoting dog anti-chaining legislation in her home state
- She has been an outspoken supporter of Detroit’s Ruth Ellis Center after the organization’s staff sent Sykes a letter asking her to visit during her 2010 tour’s stop in Detroit
- Sykes has been nominated for ten Primetime Emmys
- With one win (in 1999) for “Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Special”
- In 2001, she won the American Comedy Award for “Outstanding Female Stand Up Comic”
- She won a Comedy Central Commie Award for “Funniest TV Actress in 2003”
- In 2010 she won the GLAAD Stephen F. Kolzak Award
- In 2015 she won the Activism in the Arts honor at the Triumph Awards
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