August Wilson Will Receive Star on Hollywood Walk of Fame

Playwright August Wilson will be honored posthumously with the 2,799th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Tuesday, January 7, at 11:30 am PT at 1611 Vine Street. Wilson will be honored with a star in the category of Live Theatre/Live Performance. The event will be streamed live exclusively at www.walkoffame.com.

Joining emcee Angelique Jackson will be Denzel Washington, Danielle Deadwyler and the cast and filmmakers from The Piano Lesson. Accepting the award on behalf of the family will be Constanza Romero Wilson, wife of August. The Piano Lesson is the third Wilson play to be adapted for film by producers Denzel Washington, Todd Black and executive producer Constanza Romero Wilson.  Washington continues to bring the plays to screen in partnership with Netflix.

The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce administers the legendary Hollywood Walk of Fame for the City of Los Angeles and has proudly hosted the globally iconic star ceremonies for decades. Millions of people from here and around the world have visited this cultural landmark since 1960.  

“The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce is honored to pay tribute to trail-blazing playwright August Wilson, whose profound storytelling continues to inspire and resonate with audiences around the world,” stated Ana Martinez, Producer of the Walk of Fame ceremonies.

About August Wilson

August Wilson was born in Pittsburgh on April 27, 1945, as the fourth of seven children. He grew up in the ethnically diverse but impoverished Hill District of the city. With his German-immigrant father absent throughout his childhood, Wilson was raised mainly by his African-American mother, Daisy Wilson, whose surname he would later adopt. After dropping out of high school following unfounded accusations of plagiarism, Wilson worked odd jobs while continuing his informal education with trips to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, where he read the works of Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Ralph Ellison. Following a short enlistment in the Army in 1962, Wilson returned to working a series of menial jobs.

In 1965, Wilson purchased his first typewriter for $20, and began to write poetry inspired by the authors whose works he encountered during his trips to the public library. He passed time in coffee shops and cigar stores, observing the lives and voices of people he encountered in the Hill District, often recording his thoughts on cocktail napkins and later using these notes to create the personalities of the characters in his plays.

Inspired by the Black Power movement of the late 1960s, Wilson joined a group of poets, educators, and artists who formed the Centre Avenue Poets Theater Workshop, through which he met Rob Penny. In 1968, they co-founded the Black Horizons Theater, a community-based theater company in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. Wilson served as the director and occasional actor, while Penny was the playwright-in-residence until the mid-1970s, when the company dissolved. Wilson then moved to Minnesota in 1978, at the invitation of his friend Claude Purdy, a co-founder of St. Paul’s Penumbra Theater, where Wilson concentrated on playwriting, channeling the voices he remembered from the Hill District. His works penetrated the broad experience, both the triumphs and struggles of Black Americans, conveying their stories on the popular American stage with gravity and emotional heft. The centerpiece of Wilson’s body of work was The American Century Cycle (TACC), a career-spanning project composed of 10 plays, each one set in a different decade of the 20th century, with Pittsburgh and the Hill District in particular serving as the setting for all but one of these works. Wilson’s first professional production was Black Bart and the Sacred Hills, staged by St. Paul’s Penumbra Theater.  In 1979, he began writing Jitney. Much later, the rewritten version of Jitney went on to win an Olivier Award for Best New Play in 2002, then won the Tony Award for Best Revival in 2022. This work is considered the first installment in TACC.

Wilson won significant acclaim and attention for his next play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, his only play in TACC that does not take place in Pittsburgh (it was instead set in a 1920s Chicago recording studio). First staged in 1982 at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, it had its Broadway debut two years later under the direction of Wilson’s frequent collaborator Lloyd Richards. Writing for The New York Times, theater critic Frank Rich noted that Wilson “sends the entire history of Black America crashing down upon our heads.” Fences was Wilson’s next play, making its Broadway debut in 1987 with James Earl Jones as the lead in a role that, in its 2010 revival and 2016 film adaptation, would be reprised by Denzel Washington. The play initially ran for 525 performances and earned Wilson a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, a Tony Award for Best Play, and a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play. Wilson would later win a second Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for The Piano Lesson which launched on Netflix this past November 22nd and is available globally. His plays were nominated a record six times for this prestigious award.

In 1991, Wilson moved to Seattle, Washington with his future wife, Costume Designer Constanza Romero Wilson. While in this city he wrote five more installments in TACC: Two Trains Running, Seven Guitars, Gem of the Ocean, King Hedley II, and Radio Golf.

Other plays written by August Wilson include Fullerton Street, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, The Homecoming, How I Learned What I Learned, and The Coldest Day of the Year. His last written work, Radio Golf, premiered on Broadway in 2006, just months after his death from liver cancer.  

The curtains closed for August Wilson on October 2, 2005.