Laura Linney

Laura Leggett Linney (born February 5, 1964) is an American actress.

She is the recipient of several awards, including two Golden Globe Awards and four Primetime Emmy Awards, and has been nominated for three Academy Awards and five Tony Awards.

Linney is a 1982 graduate of Northfield Mount Hermon School, a preparatory school in Massachusetts for which she currently serves as the chair of the Arts Advisory Council.

She then attended Northwestern University before transferring to Brown University, where she studied acting with Jim Barnhill and John Emigh and served on the board of Production Workshop, the university's student theater group.

During her senior year at Brown, she performed in one of her father's plays as Lady Ada Lovelace in a production of Childe Byron, a drama in which the poet Lord Byron mends a taut, distant relationship with his daughter Ada.

Linney graduated from Brown in 1986.

and went on to study acting at the Juilliard School as a member of Group 19 (1986–90), which also included Jeanne Tripplehorn.

Linney made her Broadway debut in 1990 before receiving Tony Award nominations for the 2002 revival of The Crucible, the original Broadway productions of Sight Unseen (2004), Time Stands Still (2010), My Name Is Lucy Barton (2020), and the 2017 revival of The Little Foxes.

Linney made her New York stage debut in 1990 as Nina in the Off Broadway adaptation of The Seagull set in the Hamptons.

Conceived and directed by Jeff Cohen, the acclaimed production was mounted at the RAPP Arts Center in Alphabet City to great critical acclaim.

The New York Times wrote: "Best of all is Miss Linney's Nina. From a naive, idealistic artist's groupie with a streak of crazy determination, her Nina emerges as a woman who is a lot stronger and more complicated than the terminally wounded bird-woman that is the character's traditional interpretation. Though deeply embittered at the end of the play, she is also fortifed by a hard-won self-knowledge. Miss Linney projects the character's ambiguities with stinging force and clarity. She is clearly a talent of enormous potential."

Linney first appeared in minor roles in a few early 1990s films, including Lorenzo's Oil (1992), Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993), and Dave (1993).

Throughout the 1990s, Linney appeared on stage on Broadway and elsewhere including in Hedda Gabler, for which she won the 1994 Joe A.. Callaway Award, and a revival of Holiday in December 1995 through January 1996 (the Philip Barry play upon which the 1938 movie starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn was based).

She made her film debut with a minor role in Lorenzo's Oil (1992) and went on to receive Academy Award nominations for the dramas You Can Count on Me (2000), Kinsey (2004), and The Savages (2007).

In 1993, Linney starred in the television adaptation of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City as Mary Ann Singleton.

In October 1994, Linney guest-starred in an episode of Law & Order (episode "Blue Bamboo") as Martha Bowen.

She played a blonde American singer who successfully claimed "battered woman syndrome" as a defense to the murder of a Japanese businessman.

She was then cast in a series of thrillers, including Congo (1995), Primal Fear (1996) and Absolute Power (1997).

She is also known for her performances in Primal Fear (1996), The Truman Show (1998), Mystic River and Love Actually (both 2003), The Squid and the Whale (2005), The Nanny Diaries (2007), Hyde Park on Hudson (2012), Mr. Holmes (2015), Sully and Nocturnal Animals (both 2016).

Linney was born in Manhattan, New York City.

Her mother, Miriam Anderson "Ann" Perse (née Leggett), was a nurse at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and her father, Romulus Zachariah Linney IV, was a playwright and professor.

Linney would spend summers with her father in New Hampshire and fell in love with the stage, working with the local theatre group beginning at the age of eleven.

Linney's paternal great-great-grandfather was Republican U.S. Congressman Romulus Zachariah Linney.

She has a half-sister named Susan from her father's second marriage.

She returned as Mary Ann Singleton in 1998 in More Tales of the City.

She made her Hollywood breakthrough in 1998, praised for playing Jim Carrey's on-screen wife Meryl Burbank in Peter Weir's science-fiction comedy drama film The Truman Show.

In 2000, she starred in Kenneth Lonergan's film You Can Count on Me alongside Mark Ruffalo and Matthew Broderick.

The film was met with positive reviews from critics with an approval rating of 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, the consensus reading, "You Can Count on Me may look like it belongs on the small screen, but the movie surprises with its simple yet affecting story. Beautifully acted and crafted, the movie will simply draw you in."

Linney was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as the small town single mother Sammy Prescott.

On television, she won her first Emmy Award for the television film Wild Iris (2001), and had subsequent wins for the sitcom Frasier (2003–2004) and the miniseries John Adams (2008).

In 2001, she reprised her role as Mary Ann Singleton in Further Tales of the City.

In 2002, she starred in Wild Iris alongside Gena Rowlands and won her first Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie.

In 2002, she starred in the Broadway revival of The Crucible alongside Liam Neeson at the Virginia Theatre, which ran from March 2002 through June 2002.

She received a Best Actress Tony Award nomination for her performance as John Proctor's prudish wife Elizabeth.

Also in 2002, Linney appeared on Sandra Boynton's children's CD Philadelphia Chickens alongside Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline and Patti LuPone.

Linney sings the song "Please Can I Keep It?".

In 2003, Linney received an honorary doctor of fine arts degree from Brown.

She received an honorary doctor of fine arts degree from Juilliard when she delivered the school's commencement address in 2009.

From 2010 to 2013, she starred in the Showtime series The Big C, which won her a fourth Emmy in 2013, and from 2017 to 2022 she starred in the Netflix crime series Ozark.

Linney is also an established film actress.