In a few days Sheryl Lee Ralph’s success will be set in stone — literally — with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and, amid her excitement, she has some questions.
“It’s not as if they just hand these things out like candy,” she says of the ceremony, taking place on Jan. 29. Still, the multi-hyphenate star, who graces this week’s cover of PEOPLE, has no idea which entertainment symbol will be used to denote her life’s work.
“Oh my goodness, I don’t know. I should ask,” she says. “It could be for the Tonys, for the Grammys, the Emmys and who knows what’s next.”
Indeed, after many decades of hard-won success across stage and screen, Ralph is currently enjoying a career renaissance no one saw coming. No one, that is, except for her iconic mentors, including the late Maya Angelou and Cicely Tyson.
“One day I was on a plane, and Cicely Tyson said, ‘Many great things are going to happen to you. Many, many, many,’ ” Ralph recalls. “The elders have been good to me, and they would not be surprised.”
But at 69, Ralph has a woman 34 years her junior to thank for the career highs she’s hitting now. In 2021 actress and show runner Quinta Brunson tapped her to play veteran educator Barbara Howard on ABC’s sitcom Abbott Elementary, and in 2022 Ralph earned her first Emmy Award for the role.
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“I’m in a show that is literally lightning in a bottle,” Ralph says. “But it was not given to me. I worked towards this moment, and it took a young person to see and value the work and offer me this way forward. That doesn’t happen a lot, but it happened to me.”
That body of work includes her very first role in the 1977 film A Piece of the Action alongside Sidney Poitier, as well as her Tony-nominated run in the original Broadway production of Dreamgirls.
Now filming the fourth season of Abbott after playing completely against type as a hard-nosed parole officer in the indie film Ricky that’s heading to Sundance Film Festival this month, Ralph is busier than ever.
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Mother to two adult children with ex Eric Maurice — Etienne, 33, a newly married actor, and Ivy-Victoria (who also goes by Coco), 30, who’s her stylist — Ralph spends her free time with family, including her long-distance husband of almost 20 years, Pennsylvania State Senator Vincent Hughes.
“I love a full plate,” she says. “My team says I’m always on the go, but that’s what I’ve known. There was a time where if you didn’t strike while the iron was hot, it wasn’t happening for you. You had to go and get it.”
She continues, “It’s easy to look at the highway and think it’s always been like that, but no, there was a time when it was a dirt road, and somebody had to bust rocks to clear it, and it wasn’t easy.”
After graduating as a member of the first class of women to attend Rutgers College in New Jersey and facing “no after no” in her pursuit of an acting career, Ralph stumbled upon success when she moved to Los Angeles on a whim and landed an audition opposite Poitier at age 19 and won the role over his own daughter.
Poitier, who also directed the film, gifted her a box of makeup and hair products along with this advice: “I’m sorry the industry doesn’t have more to offer you, because you deserve it. You better learn how to take care of yourself, because there are not too many people out there that can,’” Ralph recalls. “That’s how I started learning the things I needed in an industry that didn’t know what to do with me.”
Following Dreamgirls’ success Ralph landed a spot on the ’80s sitcom It’s a Living and later built a young following in the 1990s playing Brandy Norwood’s stepmom on Moesha.
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In 2022, Ralph’s career reached new heights when she won the Emmy Award for her role in Abbott Elementary.
“It was a complete shock,” she says of the moment. “I was there to be supportive of my cast. I did not think it was going to be me. When they said my name, it was as if every angel in my life flew up and said, ‘Come on, come on. This is the moment. This is the time.’ When I got up there and did what I did, sang what I sang, said what I said, it was my whole life speaking for me, and it was never just for me, it was for others, because if it had not been for others, I wouldn’t be there.”
In all, Ralph says achieving what she has at this stage of her life proves one thing: “Don’t give up. If you don’t make it at 20 or 30, so what? Hold on to your dreams, because you can make it at 40 or 50, and it ain’t over when you’re 60. The best is yet to come, and I’m here to receive it.”
