Rarely has an actress created such a buzz with critics and audiences with such little screen time in a movie as Viola Davis, the Tony Award-winning actress who grew up in Central Falls and who, on Sunday, could walk away with an Oscar for her work in two scenes opposite Meryl Streep in Doubt.

The two connected scenes comprise the defining and most heartbreaking moment in the film. Davis plays the mother of a boy who Streep’s character, Sister Aloysius, the principal of a Catholic elementary school, believes has been the victim of sexual advances by the new priest that the nun has locked horns with.

This scene, and the one that precedes it in the nun’s office, together last barely 10 minutes. But in that brief time Davis delivers a heart-wrenching and yet horrifying monologue in which her Mrs. Miller not only expresses the deep concern and love she has for her son, but also the extraordinary lengths to which she would go to protect his opportunities for the future. In a shocking turnabout, she tearfully explains to Sister Aloysius that even if something were going on between her son and the priest, the fact that an adult had taken an interest in her boy and his education was enough.

Davis’ performance impressed film critics around the country and helped make her a serious Oscar contender for best supporting actress this year, though most prognosticators regard Penelope Cruz as the front-runner among the five nominees..

If Davis wins tonight, she will be in rarefied company. She would be the first actor from Rhode Island to win in the 81-year history of the Academy Awards. Moreover, only twice before have actresses with such limited screen time won the best supporting actress award — Judi Dench for her eight minutes as Queen Elizabeth I in 1998’s Shakespeare in Love; Beatrice Straight for her 10-minute scene in Network in 1976.

Davis’ 10 minutes were not the product of a fluke or an overnight success. They were the culmination of years of preparation.

At 43, Davis has appeared on Broadway and off-Broadway for more than a decade. She was first nominated for a Tony Award for 1996’s Seven Guitars, and later won the 2001 best actress Tony for King Hedley II. She has played dozens of roles in television (including Law & Order: SVU and City of Angels) and small roles in films (including Nights in Rodanthe opposite Diane Lane and the just-opened Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail). She honed her craft at Rhode Island College and at Juilliard in New York, not to mention her early professional stage work at Trinity Rep.

So the fact that the National Board of Review named her work in Doubt the “Best Breakthrough Performance of the Year” drew a laugh from the effusive and outgoing Davis during a phone interview with the Providence Journal last December.

She said, “At this point, I’m so happy I don’t care that I’ll be the Newcomer of the Year.”

Shortly after, she received both Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards nominations, neither of which she won. However, when Meryl Streep took the best actress award from the Screen Actors Guild, she praised her co-star in her acceptance speech, calling her “gigantically gifted” and “like a tower of power.” Then she looked to Davis and cried, “Somebody give her a movie!”

Clearly it has been a long road to her scenes with Meryl Streep and tonight’s Academy Awards ceremony for Davis, who was born in South Carolina and moved with her family to Central Falls when she was two months old.

P. William Hutchinson, professor emeritus of theater at Rhode Island College, remembers her well from among the many students he has taught over the years. He said that although everyone comes to theater courses with varying degrees of talent, Davis was one of those who stood out immediately.

“With some people it does seem to be an inbred talent,” he said in an interview. “She has that intuitive thing that just makes her great . . . the presence and just the honesty. She works hard at getting at the characteristics of the people she is playing, working to get inside the skin of the character. She works from the inside out, which makes for a very honest performance. I think this is what various directors have seen in her and what she has done in her professional life.”

At RIC she performed in productions of Hot*l Baltimore and Romeo and Juliet. For her senior project, Hutchinson said, Davis put together a monologue with Prof. Elaine Perry.Hutchinson, who has remained good friends with Davis, saw her perform her senior project for Juilliard, which was an expansion of the same one-woman show she had done at RIC, a collection of “poetry and prose, quite a variety that showed her range of talent.”

Actor Brian McEleny, who has been at Trinity Rep for a quarter-century, remembers Davis well, not only for several of the “smallish roles” she did on stage with the company following her graduation from RIC, but especially for his 1994 production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure after she had completed training at Juilliard.

It was the first time McEleny directed and he felt “she not only had this connection to the classics and language, but also this rawness that is rarely seen. She had the right chops, but she still had this incredible fierceness.”

At Trinity, Davis first crossed paths with Richard Jenkins, another Rhode Islander, who is up for a best actor Oscar tonight, though his chances of winning are regarded as remote.

McEleny remembers asking Jenkins, who was Trinity’s artistic director at the time, whether he could hire Davis for the lead role — Isabella, a nun who received a most unholy proposition from the judge who was deciding her brother’s fate. Jenkins agreed with McEleny’s assessment of her talent and gave the go-ahead.

Davis also landed a role in August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone at Trinity. Marion Simon, the assistant to theater founder Adrian Hall, recalled Davis’s reading for the role in a 2004 interview.

“You just believed every word that came out of her mouth,” said Simon. “There was no acting or artifice, just a real reaching out to the audience.” It was her first time in a Wilson play. (For her second, Wilson’s King Hedley II, she took home the 2001 Tony Award.)

Davis could have stayed at Trinity, but wanted to go beyond the confines of Providence “She knew she wanted to study with the people who had taught some of the people she admired most,” recalled Hutchinson, adding that one of those she admired was Meryl Streep.

John Patrick Shanley, the Academy Award-winning writer (for 1987’s Moonstruck) who wrote and directed Doubt from his Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play, said that “when you give her notes for a scene it looks like she has indigestion. But that’s normal. A lot of actors do that. They go inward and search for something in the character. It doesn’t look pretty, but what comes out is wonderfully responsive to the scene.”

Shanley recalled that he auditioned Davis for the role of Mrs. Miller, after having screen-tested several other highly regarded actresses for the role. “When Viola read for the scene — and I was shooting with only a skeletal crew — it was like they stopped breathing. With the other actresses they had been moving and shifting equipment, adjusting the lights. But when Viola began the scene, everyone froze,” Shanley said.

“She registers power and effects this aura. She has enormous stage chops which would be necessary for this film which calls for extended dialogue skills. She has enormous emotional power.”

Despite more than two decades as a working actress, she recalled last December that her main impetus for her performance in Doubt was that “I just didn’t want to look bad. That was my goal.”

By the time she arrived for rehearsals on the film in November 2007 she was more than prepared, having studied the script of Shanley’s play for four weeks so she could really understand the character.

But the pressure was on because “I knew that I would be playing opposite Meryl Streep. I knew it was a Pulitzer Prize-winning play. I knew that it was only one scene, but that it had won the Tony Award for [Adriane Lenox] when she played Mrs. Miller in the Broadway production.”

She recently told Jay Leno on his TV show that she found the prospect of playing a scene with her idol “terrifying. But she couldn’t have been any more wonderful. She’s absolutely normal … like so normal that it’s shocking because she’s the 300-pound gorilla of acting.”

In her December interview with The Providence Journal she described Streep as being “just as committed to your work as to her own. She invests in your work. And she also is the most down-to-earth, interesting, fun person to work with and she has respect for you. I found my experience with her to be absolutely terrifying and also the most rewarding experience of my life.”

Shanley realized the pressure of doing one big scene “that was going to be shot in a relatively short period of time” … and then asking her to do it again.

He recalls instructions he gave to the actresses at the start of the outdoor scene, which called for a gloomy day. “I told Meryl you’re the brakes and Viola, you’re the gas … get down the street as fast as possible.” But when he saw the dailies he realized Davis was moving too fast. Shanley recalled sheepishly, “The acting was good, but the direction was faulty.” He called the actresses back to reshoot part of the scene the next day, ostensibly because of a lighting defect in the first shoot. But when they got to the location, everyone realized that the entire scene was going to be reshot … much more slowly.

And that’s how Academy Award-worthy performances are shaped and born.

mjanuson@projo.com