Last week, Sheryl Lee Ralph became a first-time Emmy nominee. The entertainer was nominated for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her role as Barbara Howard within the breakout ABC hit Abbott Elementary, and for a star who’s been performing for audiences on stages and TV and film sets for greater than 40 years, it was an extended time coming.

“I never thought I’d see this so I’m thrilled at the chance,” Ralph told ESSENCE amid the EMMY buzz ahead of her official nomination. “I’d like to be in that group of actors. I’d like to see our whole forged get the eye it deserves. I’d like to see Quinta make history. Just the thought, it makes you go, ‘Oh God, I wish, I hope’, but I got the golden ticket. So let’s just put it on the market and say, ‘God, you already know what? You bought me this far, where we going, God, because I do know you’ve got great plans.’

Ralph’s profession within the entertainment industry began on the stage together with her role as Deena Jones in Dreamgirls for which she earned a Tony Award nomination for Best Actress in a Musical in 1982. From there, a variety of memorable parts which have kept Ralph working steadily for 4 many years followed, and he or she has her own list of characters she counts amongst her favorites.

“I’m going to have to completely give it up primary at once to Mrs. Barbara Howard. I like Barbara Howard on Abbott elementary, a task that I used to be handpicked for. I connect Barbara Howard to Barbara Hanley, my very first role in a movie under the direction of Sydney Poitier. I connect that rough little raw ghetto child to the girl that Barbara Howard has grow to be. I’d also should say how much I like Deena Jones, a personality that I created, a personality that Tom Eyen gave to me and said, ‘Put yourself on this character’ and a personality that has now grow to be such a focus in theater. We saw her in movies, played by Beyoncé, and I now see Deena Jones as an iconic, character for people. I like her.

“I also love Rita Lu Watson’s mother, Mrs. Watson,” Ralph continues. “I like that character and the way in which it has really built itself into the hearts and minds of generation of young people. I also love Claudette on Ray Donovan. You realize, you’re talking a couple of woman who was a stripper on the pole and he or she got that cash and he or she reinvented herself and shows one of the best life possible for herself. I like that in regards to the character. After which I like President Kelly Wade on Motherland Fort Salem, where I play the forty fifth president in an alternate world. And I just thank Elliot Lawrence for creating such an incredible character for me to play for 3 seasons.”

Though she’s already named the requested five characters, Ralph adds a sixth that members of this generation hold most fondly of their memories. “Oh — and I can’t miss Dee,” she says in reference to her TV mother role on Moesha.

Good roles could be hard to come back by for even one of the best actress and even harder for a Black woman in Hollywood. But as a baby of the ’60s, Ralph, now 66, says her parents prepared her the cruel realities of racism, that are way more difficult outside of Tinseltown than inside. “I actually consider it was the strength and love of my parents,” she says of her resilience. “I’m an immigrant’s child and my mother, that strong Jamaican woman that said ‘You’re sensible. You’re beautiful,’ she was so supportive in at all times making me be ok with my myself.”

‘Being a baby of the sixties was very difficult. Bullying was at a level that was just in need of having guns and walking into the supermarket and targeting you,” she continues. “It was the type of thing that might truly break your spirit. But my parents, my father and my mother were so good about encouraging me and my brothers to maneuver forward, to attempt to close your eyes to the heinous things that we saw, the out and out assassination and murders of excellent people. The proven fact that things like lynching were an actual thing. The proven fact that you’ve at all times known in your community that Black folks disappear at night.”

“I take into consideration things like that and to have my parents say, ‘But you’re going to make it. We’re going to make it to the opposite side — having faced that, what’s Hollywood got for me?

While ultimately God’s plans differed from Ralph’s own — or perhaps her parents’ who, in typical Caribbean household fashion, encouraged their daughter to grow to be a physician or lawyer, the singer, actress, and activist is obvious she was going to be good either way.

“Listen, irrespective of what I ended up doing, I used to be going to have an ideal life,” Ralph says. “I used to be going to like my life because I used to be put here to live life and similar to on my Twitter and my Instagram, I encourage people to rise to the occasion of your individual life.

“I might have been a physician, I might have been a lawyer. I might have been a minister. I might have been a social employee. I might have been a housewife, whatever it was, I used to be going to be glad in my life. And I used to be going to boost some wonderful children, like my two children, Etienne and Ivy and I used to be going to live my life.”