Jennifer Kate Hudson (born September 12, 1981) is a singer-songwriter, actor, talk show host, and producer from the United States. She has garnered numerous awards for her work in recorded music, film, television, and theater during her career. Hudson became the first African-American woman and the youngest woman to win all four major American entertainment awards: Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony (EGOT). In 2013, she was also honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2020, Time named her one of the world’s 100 most important people.
Hudson rose to prominence as a finalist on the third season of American Idol in 2004, finishing seventh. She made her cinematic debut as Effie White in the musical Dreamgirls (2006), for which she received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, making her the youngest African-American to do so. Hudson signed with Arista Records and released her self-titled debut studio album in 2008, which was certified Gold in the United States and the United Kingdom and won the Grammy Award for Best R&B Album.
Hudson’s subsequent studio albums, I Remember Me (2011) and JHUD (2014), both charted in the top ten of the Billboard 200, and the former was certified Gold in the United States. In the meantime, she has appeared in the films Sex and the City (2008), The Secret Life of Bees (2008), Winnie Mandela (2011), Black Nativity (2013), Sing (2016), Cats (2019), and Respect (2021), as well as the television, shows Smash (2012), Empire (2015), and Confirmation (2016), and on Broadway in The Color Purple. From 2017 until 2019, Hudson served as a coach on both the UK and US versions of The Voice, becoming the first female coach to win the former. In 2022, she began hosting The Jennifer Hudson Show, a chat show.