How to Use prima donna in a Sentence

prima donna

noun
  • We are looking for team players, not prima donnas.
  • The actress is a temperamental prima donna.
  • The five-star prima donna busts and the unrated late bloomers full of heart.
    Fletcher Page, Cincinnati.com, 26 July 2019
  • Even the indoor swimming pool was made to look fit for a prima donna.
    Stephanie Rosenbloom, New York Times, 27 Sep. 2022
  • The fun isn’t so much about Dee Dee as watching Streep play a faltering prima donna to the hilt.
    Charles McNulty Theater Critic, Los Angeles Times, 3 Dec. 2020
  • The entire crew is ready to start working, but Gladys is being a prima donna.
    Rachel Manteuffel, Washington Post, 13 Aug. 2019
  • But Zdebski said he was warned that Brenden Rice had some prima donna in him, was selfish.
    Richard Obert, azcentral, 12 Mar. 2020
  • Bertolucci fans beware: The director comes across here as a pompous and careless prima donna.
    Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter, 3 Sep. 2019
  • The company’s prima donna soprano, Trista Moldovan, exhibits a world-class voice, even though hers is meant to be a secondary talent.
    Tom Titus, Daily Pilot, 15 July 2019
  • Some players even act just like prima donna magazine writers and fight with their editors over every word.
    Amos Barshad, New York Times, 21 Feb. 2018
  • By being one of the few premium wide receivers who is not a prima donna and takes serious pride in his dirty work (including blocking), Jones is one of the NFL’s most respected players.
    Andy Benoit, SI.com, 13 June 2018
  • The situation Tuesday had tough guys around baseball – and less tough guys (writers) who work at keyboards – shaking their heads at what many thought was prima donna behavior by Strasburg when his team needs him the most.
    Tod Leonard, sandiegouniontribune.com, 11 Oct. 2017
  • Some might call it retrograde for a work from 1996, but its indebtedness to Puccini suits a story about a wistful prima donna in the early nineteen-hundreds.
    Condé Nast, The New Yorker, 10 Nov. 2023
  • Burly and a little unkempt, Madden earned a place in America’s heart with a likable, unpretentious style that was refreshing in a sports world of spiraling salaries and prima donna stars.
    Josh Dubow, chicagotribune.com, 29 Dec. 2021
  • Burly and a little unkempt, Madden earned a place in America’s heart with a likable, unpretentious style that was refreshing in a sports world of spiraling salaries and prima donna stars.
    Josh Dubow, ajc, 29 Dec. 2021
  • There is soprano Audrey Luna as the prima donna, whose stratospheric high notes are both an expression of her star power and a token of her inability to blend in with the others.
    Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle, 27 Mar. 2018
  • Two characters seemingly tossed in to further stimulate the plot are the obsequious hotel bellhop (Robert Moniz) and the ambitious local prima donna (Lori Kelley).
    Tom Titus, latimes.com, 7 June 2018
  • But Mira turns out to be far less of a prima donna than her fellow actors, as Vikander’s subtle, sensitive performance gradually reveals.
    Los Angeles Times, 25 July 2022
  • Jackson’s is an essentially sympathetic account of de Gaulle in London—which does not keep de Gaulle from seeming even more of an egotist and a prima donna than his previous biographers had made him.
    Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker, 12 Aug. 2021
  • By delivering a pitch-perfect performance as a fire-breathing prima donna, Welch also poked fun at her reputation (fairly earned or not) for being difficult to work with.
    Oliver Gettell, EW.com, 15 Feb. 2023
  • The bitter ex-wife who hires him to ruin her ex-husband’s favorite team, the vapid influencer, the prima donna athlete — nearly everybody embodies a stereotype that eventually gets subverted.
    New York Times, 14 July 2021

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'prima donna.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: