Oscar nominees with stage roots

The first time New York noticed Viola Davis -- at least, the first time I noticed her -- she was playing Vera, the sometimes woman of a struggling blues musician in August Wilson's "Seven Guitars."

That was 16 years ago, practically a lifetime on the Hollywood calendar. And here she is today at the Oscars, up against long-ago stage veterans Meryl Streep and Glenn Close for her portrayal of a slow-burning nobody's-fool maid in "The Help." So far, that performance has been nominated for all the major awards, winning the NAACP Image Award and best actress from the Screen Actors Guild.

So I've been wondering if anyone then picked out Davis as the rare black actress who would break into big-time movie consciousness without being a singer, a dancer or even an obvious romantic stunner. It has always been her quiet -- the layers upon layers of complex internal life -- that has riveted audience attention. She makes us come to her.

In that 1996 ensemble drama, however, it was impossible to ignore the extraordinary, furious sadness. She was so transparent she actually let us watch the character as she opened and closed with the joys and burdens of life. In 2001, there came another Wilson ensemble -- "King Hedley II" -- with Davis as another wary, loving woman feeling the loneliness of more lost black men. She won her first Tony Award. Her second came in 2010 for magnificently holding her own against Denzel Washington as his wife in Wilson's "Fences."

Kenny Leon, director of that Tony-winning revival, describes Davis as "transformational. She is the truth," he says, "She has an inner beauty and a powerful inner strength that translates richly, no matter the medium."

But it was Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage ("Ruined") who cast Davis in her first and only lead stage role in "Intimate Apparel" in 2004. She played Esther, the complex and independent seamstress who made lingerie for prostitutes and Fifth Avenue ladies in 1905.

"Viola's talent is so magnificent that Hollywood could only ignore it for so long," Nottage told me last week. "I knew the minute I worked with her. She assimilates information so quickly that she's an acting machine. It's a testament to her tenacity that she propelled herself to the very top tier in the world."

But for theatergoers who love to keep score -- and how many do not? -- Davis is not the only crossover news at the Oscars. How funny, in a lovely way, that Christopher Plummer, 82, is a favorite to win his first Academy Award in an industry that probably still thinks of him as Capt. Von Trapp in "The Sound of Music."

Plummer, a two-Tony theater icon best known for showy virtuosity, is already sweeping the early supporting actor prizes for playing a long-closeted gay man who comes out to his grown son in the modest film "Beginners." Plummer told USA Today that he appreciated the chance to "underplay on-screen, which is something I am not always asked to do." Accepting the Critics Choice award in January, he said he was "completely turned on" by the role and the acclaim.

Davis got a supporting actress Oscar nomination for her 11-minute appearance as a concerned mother in the 2008 movie of "Doubt," which starred Meryl Streep as a tough nun. As the movie ads for "The Iron Lady" keep reminding us, Streep, who plays Margaret Thatcher, hasn't won an Oscar in 29 years. As everyone surely knows, she holds the record for the most nominations -- 17.

But how many remember that theater was the art form that raised her. Although I wasn't in New York for most of her historic few years in the late '70s, I cherish the night I saw her play all the roles in "Alice in Concert" on a tiny stage upstairs at the Public Theater. She wore overalls, sat on the floor and carried on her own conversation as both the White Queen and the Red Queen with a silliness that was seriously profound.

She was Joe Papp's first choice to succeed him at the Public, but Streep, who said movies gave her more time to raise her children, turned the job down. After many years of moviemaking, Streep has returned for a few brief runs recently in the Public's free Shakespeare in the Park. Maybe someday she'll come back to the stage for real.

Finally, the Oscars have stolen plays and not just actors this year. "The Ides of March," the presidential-campaign movie starring George Clooney and Ryan Gosling, will feel familiar to anyone who saw a play called "Farragut North" at the Atlantic Theater in 2008. Beau Willimon wrote that spy-versus-spy-versus-spy campaign story, which Clooney reportedly read and wanted to adapt before it even was staged. In my review, I wrote that the plot-heavy play felt like a misplaced movie script.

Steven Spielberg's producer made him see the "War Horse" play after she wept through the spectacle, with its amazing puppet horses. The puppets got a special Tony. The movie, nominated for best picture, uses real horses. No horses are nominated.