Viola Davis recently became the 18th member to join the honorary EGOT club after she won a Grammy last weekend for the audiobook version of her memoir. However, some casual fans might be curious: What exactly is an EGOT?
First things first, the EGOT stands for Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. For somebody to ‘EGOT,’ it means that person has to win (at least one) of each of those four awards. And it’s very difficult to do, but there are a ton of celebrities currently that are only one award shy of joining Davis.
There are also other special honors in the entertainment world. In addition to the EGOT, there is the ESOT — which swaps out someone not needing to win a Grammy but a Screen Actors Guild Award instead.
In this category, there are only ten winners so far. Davis is already one of them, as she achieved her ESOT in 2017.
Lastly, there is the prestigious PEGOT, which means all of the former EGOT winners would have had to win either a Peabody award or a Pulitzer.
There are only five people that have done so: Barbra Streisand, Mike Nichols, Rita Moreno (Peabody winners), Richard Rodgers, and Marvin Hamlisch (Pulitzer winners).