Laura Leggett Linney (born February 5, 1964) is an American actress of film, television, and theatre. Linney has won three Emmy Awards, two Golden Globes, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. She has been nominated for the Academy Award three times and once for the BAFTA Award. She has also been nominated three times for a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play.
Linney was born in Manhattan. Her mother, Miriam Anderson "Ann" Perse (née Leggett), is a nurse who worked at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, and her father, Romulus Linney, was a well-known playwright and professor. He died on January 15, 2011. Linney's paternal great-great-grandfather was Republican U.S. Congressman Romulus Zachariah Linney. Despite her pedigree, Linney grew up living with her mother in a small one-bedroom apartment in modest circumstances, after her parents' divorce. She has a half-sister, Susan, from her father's second marriage. Linney graduated from the Northfield Mount Hermon School in 1982. 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 theatre group. Linney graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1986 and then went on to study acting at the Juilliard School.
Linney appeared in minor roles in a few early 1990s films, including Dave in 1993, before coming to prominence in the public television mini-series Tales of the City. She was then cast in a series of high-profile thrillers, including Congo, Primal Fear and Absolute Power. She made her Hollywood breakthrough in 1998, playing Jim Carrey's on-screen wife in The Truman Show, for which she received critical acclaim.
In 2000, Linney was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in the film You Can Count on Me. The same year, she also appeared in the role of an artist's model in the low-budget film Maze with Rob Morrow. In 2003, Linney appeared in several notable films, including Mystic River, Love Actually and The Life of David Gale. Her 2004 performance in Kinsey, as the title character's wife, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
In 2005, Linney starred in horror film The Exorcism of Emily Rose and the comedy-drama The Squid and the Whale; for the latter role, she received a Golden Globe nomination for "Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy". In 2006, Linney appeared in the political satire Man of the Year, the comedy Driving Lessons (starring Rupert Grint of Harry Potter fame), and the Australian drama Jindabyne by Ray Lawrence. Jindabyne was based on Raymond Carver's short novel So Much Water so Close to Home.
In 2007, Linney appeared in the spy thriller Breach, the comedy-drama The Nanny Diaries – opposite Scarlett Johansson and based on the book by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, and The Savages, where Linney starred with Philip Seymour Hoffman. She received her third Academy Award nomination for this film – this time as Academy Award for Best Actress.
In 2008, Linney starred in The Other Man, with Antonio Banderas and Liam Neeson, the latter whom she had starred with in Kinsey and Love Actually.
Linney starred as Mary Ann Singleton in the television adaptations of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City books (1993, 1998, and 2001). She won her first Emmy Award in 2002 for "Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie" for Wild Iris. In 2004, she won her second Emmy Award as "Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series," for her recurring role as the final love interest of Frasier Crane in the television series Frasier. In 2008, Linney won an Emmy Award in the category Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie for her portrayal of Abigail Adams, wife of the second president of the United States, in the HBO mini-series John Adams.
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.
Laura Linney returned to series television as actress and executive producer in Showtime's half-hour series about cancer, The Big C, which debuted in mid-2010. She stars as a suburban wife and mother who explores the emotional ups and downs of suffering cancer, and the changes it brings to her life and her sense of who she is. She won a Golden Globe award for her performance in January 2011.
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