Best Known As: Oscar-nominated star of You Can Count on Me
Laura Linney has been on stage and screen since the early 1990s. A New York-raised and Julliard-trained actress, she is especially known for playing restrained and earnest roles in melodramas such as You Can Count on Me (2000, with Mark Ruffalo) and Mystic River (2003, with Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon). Linney got her start as an understudy on Broadway, and while pursuing a stage career she began working in film and television. By the end of the 1990s she had gone from bit parts to secondary roles in major movies, including Absolute Power (1997, playing Clint Eastwood's daughter) and The Truman Show (1998, playing Jim Carrey's pretend wife). Since then she's worked steadily and received heaps of praise, if not much Hollywood buzz. She won Oscar nominations for You Can Count on Me and Kinsey (2004, starring Liam Neeson as Alfred Kinsey); she won Emmy awards for her 2003 guest role on the sitcom Frasier and for her leading role in the 2000 TV-movie Wild Iris; and she nabbed a Tony nomination in 2002 for her performance on stage in Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Although she maintains her long-held connection to the theater (her father, Romulus Linney, is a playwright), Linney works like crazy in the movies. Her recent films include Love Actually (2003); The Squid and the Whale (2005); Driving Lessons (2006, starring Rupert Grint); Jindabyne (2006); Man of the Year (2006, starring Robin Williams); The Hottest State (2006, written and directed by Ethan Hawke); and The Savages (2007, with Philip Seymour Hoffman).
Career Highlights: The Truman Show, More Tales of the City, You Can Count On Me
First Major Screen Credit: Tales of the City (1993)
Biography
Displaying blonde, corn-fed good looks, Laura Linney has built a career playing idealistic women who are not always as normal as they appear. Linney came to film via theater, a medium in which she had been involved more or less since birth. The daughter of respected off-Broadway playwright Romulus Linney, Laura Linney was born in New York City on February 5, 1964. Her parents divorced when she was six months old. Thanks to her father's job, Linney grew up working in the theater, both behind the scenes and, in her late teens, on the stage. Following prep school in Massachusetts, she attended both Brown University and Juilliard, and she was soon appearing in a number of Broadway productions. She garnered notice for her roles in plays like The Seagull and Six Degrees of Separation, and won particular acclaim for her performance in Hedda Gabler.
Linney made her onscreen debut in 1992 with a small role as a teacher in Lorenzo's Oil. The following year, she had a brief but pivotal role as Kevin Kline's presidential mistress in Dave, appeared in Searching for Bobby Fischer, and landed a lead as one of the protagonists of Armistead Maupin's acclaimed Tales of the City, which aired on PBS. Linney later reprised her role as Mary Ann Singleton for More Tales of the City in 1998. Following leads in two box-office failures, A Simple Twist of Fate (1994) and Congo (1995), Linney had a supporting role as Richard Gere's lawyer/ex in Primal Fear (1996). Based on the strength of her performance, Clint Eastwood chose her to play his daughter -- another lawyer -- in Absolute Power the following year. In 1998, Linney sent up her wholesome, fresh-scrubbed appearance to great effect as Truman Burbank's wife in Peter Weir's highly acclaimed The Truman Show.
The actress finally came into her own in 2000, thanks to two very different parts in two highly acclaimed independent features. Writer/director Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count on Me featured Linney as Sammy, a small-town single mother whose placid life takes some interesting turns when she's visited by her errant brother Terry (Mark Ruffalo). Aided by Lonergan's precise script and her own copious note-taking, Linney turned in her most nuanced, accomplished performance to date. Critics paid attention: after its much-heralded debut at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival, the film went on to garner a slew of recognition for its lead actress, including Best Actress of the Year awards from the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle, and an eventual Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Linney further polished her reputation with a supporting turn as the icy Bertha Dorset in director Terence Davies' adaptation of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, released in late 2000.
In 2007 Linney offered a spot-on portrayal of a dissatisfied Manhattan wife and mother in The Nanny Diaries, and earned a wealth of strong reviews for her work in Tamara Jenkins' The Savages. Playing a neurotic woman opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman as her brother, Linney scored her third Academy Award nomination.
2008 brought Linney her fourth Golden Globe nomination, and first win, for the portrayl of first lady Abigail Adams in the acclaimed HBO miniseries John Adams. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide
Linney married David Adkins in 1995. They divorced in 2000. In 2007, she became engaged to Marc Schauer, a real estate agent from Telluride, Colorado.[6]
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.[3] 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 when she played Jim Carrey's wife in The Truman Show, for which she received critical acclaim.[3]
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.
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 had 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.[3] 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.[3] She also received a Golden Globe and SAG award for Best Performance by an Actress In a Mini-series or Motion Picture Made for Television in 2009 for this role.
Laura Linney will give series television a try in Showtime's new half-hour series about cancer, Showtime announced on August 27, 2009. The series, tentatively titled The C Word, will also be executive produced by Linney, who stars as a suburban wife and mother who explores the emotional ups and downs of a cancer battle.[10]
