Marcia Gay Harden

Harden was born in the La Jolla area of San Diego, California, the daughter of Texas natives Beverly Harden (née Bushfield), a housewife, and Thad Harold Harden (1932–2002), who was a Captain and fighter pilot who served 30 years in the United States Navy.

She has three sisters and one brother.

Harden's brother is named Thaddeus, as are her father and her former husband.

Harden's family frequently moved because of her father's job, living in Japan, Germany, Greece, California, and Maryland.

Marcia Gay Harden (born August 14, 1959) is an American actress.

Harden graduated from Surrattsville High School in Clinton, Maryland in 1976.

Harden's first film role was in a 1979 student-produced film at the University of Texas.

She received a Bachelor of Arts in theater from the University of Texas at Austin in 1980.

Throughout the 1980s, she appeared in several television programs, including Simon & Simon, Kojak, and CBS Summer Playhouse.

She appeared in The Imagemaker (1986), her first film screen role, in which she played a stage manager.

Harden received a Master of Fine Arts from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 1988.

Her breakthrough came in the 1990 Coen brothers film Miller's Crossing.

She appeared in the Coen brothers' Miller's Crossing (1990), a 1930s mobster drama in which she first gained wide exposure.

Even so, at the time, living in New York City, she had to go back to doing catering jobs "because I didn't have any money".

Throughout the 1990s, she continued to appear in films and television.

Harden played actress Ava Gardner alongside Philip Casnoff as Frank Sinatra in the 1992 made-for-TV miniseries Sinatra.

Harden made her Broadway debut in 1993, starring in Tony Kushner's epic play Angels in America: Millennium Approaches/Angels in America: Perestroika for which she was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play.

Harden debuted on Broadway in the role of Harper Pitt (and others) in Tony Kushner's Angels in America in 1993.

The role earned her critical acclaim and she received a Tony Award nomination (Best Featured Actress in a Play).

Her other notable film credits include The First Wives Club (1996), Flubber (1997), Space Cowboys (2000), Mona Lisa Smile (2003), and the Fifty Shades film trilogy.

Her notable film roles include the Disney sci-fi comedy Flubber (1997), a popular hit in which she co-starred with Robin Williams; the supernatural drama Meet Joe Black (1998), playing the under-appreciated daughter of a tycoon (Anthony Hopkins, co-starring Brad Pitt); Labor of Love (1998), a Lifetime television film in which she starred with David Marshall Grant; and Space Cowboys (2000), an all-star adventure-drama about aging astronauts.

For her portrayal of artist Lee Krasner in the 2000 biographical film Pollock, she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

In 2000, Harden won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of painter Lee Krasner in the biographical film Pollock.

She received a second Academy Award nomination for her performance as Celeste Boyle in the drama film Mystic River (2003).

In 2004, she received a second Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the mystery crime drama Mystic River.

Harden guest-starred as FBI undercover agent Dana Lewis posing as a white supremacist in "Raw", an episode of the popular crime drama Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

This role earned Harden her first Emmy Award nomination for best guest actress in a drama series in 2007.

Harden appeared in several 2007 films, including Sean Penn's Into the Wild and Frank Darabont's The Mist (opposite Thomas Jane and Laurie Holden), based on the novella by Stephen King.

Also in 2007, she shared top billing with Kevin Bacon in Rails & Ties, the directorial debut of Alison Eastwood.

Harden played a woman who has a mastectomy in Home (2008).

(Her character in Rails & Ties also had a mastectomy.) Scenes in both films required her to bear her breasts, with the missing breast removed using computer-generated imagery.

In Home, her co-stars include her daughter, Eulala Scheel.

Harden starred in the Christmas Cottage, a story of the early artistic beginnings of the painter Thomas Kinkade.

She returned to Broadway in 2009 as Veronica in Yazmina Reza's comedic play God of Carnage, with her performance earning her the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.

Harden's television credits include the HBO series The Newsroom, the ABC series How to Get Away with Murder, the Apple TV+ series The Morning Show, and CBS series Code Black and So Help Me Todd.

She received her first Primetime Emmy Award nomination for her role as FBI Special Agent Dana Lewis in the crime drama series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and earned a second Primetime Emmy Award nomination for her performance as Janina Krzyżanowska in the television film The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler (2009).

Harden appeared as a regular on the FX series Damages as a shrewd corporate attorney opposite Glenn Close and William Hurt in 2009.

She received a 2009 Emmy nomination for her role in The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler, a TV film also starring Oscar-winner Anna Paquin.

She was a Best Supporting Actress in a TV Movie/Miniseries nominee and lost to Shohreh Aghdashloo.

She reprised the role in the series' eighth-season premiere and again in the 12th-season episode "Penetration" as a rape victim.