Perhaps best-known for her performance as Claire Huxtable on "The Cosby Show," Phylicia Rashad has also appeared on "A Different World," "The Cosby Mysteries," and the later sitcom "Cosby." She has won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actress in a Comedy Series for her work on "Cosby." She has also done much more diverse work in movies, appearing as Eliza in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and as Aunt Polly in "Polly," an adaptation of Pollyanna, as well as in its sequel "Polly: Comin' Home," as Ma Ponk in "Once Upon a Time... When We Were Colored," and in a wide array of other films. She also works under her maiden name of Phylicia Allen or Phylicia Ayers-Allen, and has begun work as a producer on a film entitled "The Old Settler," based on a story by Willa Cather. She is credited with remarking, "There's always something to suggest that you'll never be who you wanted to be. Your choice is to take it or keep on moving."
She is also a vegetarian and an advocate of meditation, saying that "Meditation is the power that leads you to your own truth. Everybody needs to be free. The main thing meditation frees you from is the idea of 'do-ership,' the thinking that 'I am doing this.'
When you're free from the idea of doership then something else within you emerges. It is yourself."
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