How Sisters Phylicia Rashad and Debbie Allen Have Raised a Powerful Family of Artists
For us, the arts were as much a part of life as climbing trees,” Phylicia Rashad says of the childhood in Houston that she and her sister Debbie Allen shared. It’s no surprise, considering the two were raised by a Pulitzer Prize–nominated mother, the poet Vivian Ayers, and a theater fanatic dentist father, Andrew Arthur Allen Jr., whose social circle included artists like John Biggers.
To this day the family is among the most prominent in American culture. Phylicia (center left) is a Tony-winning, Emmy-nominated actress, singer, and director, and her daughter, Condola Rashad (far left), is a four-time Tony nominee (she starred in Saint Joan and A Doll’s House, Part 2) who also appears in the television series Billions.
Debbie (far right) is a Golden Globe–winning actress, choreographer, director, and producer whose credits include Grey’s Anatomy and Fame and who once served on the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Her daughter Vivian Nixon (center right) is an actress and dancer who has starred in Broadway shows including Memphis.
Both sisters developed an interest in the arts early—Phylicia was drawn to theater, Debbie to dance—and despite growing up under segregation, they were always encouraged. “I was the entertainment for the family,” says Allen, who will be the subject of an upcoming documentary produced by Shonda Rhimes. “I would be in the back yard, performing to the birds and trees and clouds.”
Indeed, when no ballet school in Houston would admit young Debbie, her mother installed a ballet barre in the dining room and hired a veteran dancer to be her daughter’s coach.
So when Phylicia and Debbie became mothers, they did the same kinds of things for their daughters. When, at the age of four, Condola announced, “Mommy, I need a piano teacher, a reading teacher, and a dancing teacher,” Phylicia obliged. And when the teenage Vivian felt homesick at the prestigious Kirov Ballet School in Washington, DC, Debbie created a conservatory in Los Angeles: the ever-expanding Debbie Allen Dance Academy, a rigorous preprofessional program that draws everyone from scholarship students to children of Hollywood royalty.
Neither mother pushed her daughter into the arts, but both Vivian and Condola describe childhoods of total immersion. “We were included in whatever they were doing, and I aspired to that level of professionalism and love for what they do,” Condola says. “I was in the bassinet under the piano during Fame,” Vivian says. She also danced in an Academy Awards broadcast when she was only eight.
While talent may be genetic, what has also been passed down is an undeniable work ethic. “I’ve never made a single phone call for Condola,” says Phylicia, who was the first African-American woman to win the Tony for best actress. And Debbie, who isn’t one to mince words, praises her dedicated daughter’s accomplishments in dance as “otherworldly.”
Still, all four women attribute their success to the family’s 95-year-old matriarch. “My grandmother is the root to this whole tree,” Condola says. “We are all extensions of different parts of her.”
