AKA Laura Legett Linney

Born: 5-Feb-1964
Birthplace: New York City

Gender: Female
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Actor

Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Meryl in film The Truman Show

As a child, Laura Linney attended boarding school, and spent three summers at Camp Equinita, a private summer camp for children. Her parents divorced while Linney was an infant, and she was mostly raised by her mother. But the time she spent with her father (a professor, playwright, and two-time Obie winner) had a profound impact, and young Linney soon decided she would be an actress. When she was 12, her father got her a job as a stagehand at a New Hampshire repertory theatre. She later studied drama at Northwestern, Brown, and the Juilliard School, where she became good friends with another student, Jeanne Tripplehorn.

On stage at Juilliard, Linney once had a massive anxiety attack or "near nervous breakdown." "There I was on stage," she says, "and suddenly I came out in these sweats. I couldn't concentrate. ... I wasn't sleeping either, which made me even loonier. But it wasn't depression, it was fear, a very odd thing. I was just terrified that something was going to split open."

After Juilliard, Linney's career progressed slowly. She filmed several commercials, appeared in a few plays, and eventually understudied in the original Broadway production of Six Degrees of Separation. Her first film role was a small part as a teacher in Lorenzo's Oil, with Nick Nolte and Susan Sarandon. In the 1993 PBS miniseries Tales of the City, Linney played the nominal lead, Mary Ann Singleton, a sweet girl from Nowheresville who moved to wild 1970s San Francisco. The series was a huge hit for public television, but when some viewers complaints about its positive portrayal of assorted "immoral" lifestyles, PBS decided against filming a sequel. Three sequels have aired on Showtime instead, with Linney reprising her role. She has also become good friends with Armistead Maupin, the author behind the series.

In films, Linney's breakthrough role came in The Truman Show in 1998, where she played Jim Carrey's duplicitous wife. She was nominated for an Oscar for You Can Count on Me in 2000, playing a woman reunited with her estranged brother (Mark Ruffalo). To help that low-budget film get made, she took only the union minimum for her work, about $10,000.

Father: Romulus Linney (playwright, The Sorrows of Frederick)
Mother: Ann Legett Sims Perse (nurse, divorced from Linney in 1964)
Mother: Laura Callahan (stepmother, executive at Rockefeller Foundation, m. Romulus Linney)
Sister: Susan Linney (stepsister, book editor, b. 1975 to Romulus Linney and Marge Linney)
Husband: David Adkins (stage actor, m. 1995, div. 2000)
Boyfriend: Eric Stoltz (actor, 2001)

    High School: Northfield Mount Hermon School, Northfield, MA (1982)
    University: BFA Theater Arts, Brown University (1986)
    University: Juilliard School (1989)

    FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
    The Nanny Diaries (24-Aug-2007)
    Breach (12-Feb-2007)
    The Savages (19-Jan-2007)
    Man of the Year (13-Oct-2006)
    The Hottest State (2-Sep-2006)
    Jindabyne (23-May-2006)
    Driving Lessons (21-Feb-2006)
    The Exorcism of Emily Rose (1-Sep-2005)
    The Squid and the Whale (2005)
    Kinsey (12-Nov-2004)
    P.S. (3-Sep-2004)
    Love Actually (7-Sep-2003)
    Mystic River (23-May-2003)
    The Life of David Gale (7-Feb-2003)
    The Mothman Prophecies (25-Jan-2002)
    The Laramie Project (10-Jan-2002)
    Wild Iris (5-Aug-2001)
    Further Tales of the City (6-May-2001)
    Maze (10-Oct-2000)
    Running Mates (13-Aug-2000)
    The House of Mirth (5-Aug-2000)
    You Can Count On Me (21-Jan-2000)
    Love Letters (12-Apr-1999)
    Armistead Maupin's More Tales of the City (7-Jun-1998)
    The Truman Show (5-Jun-1998)
    Absolute Power (14-Feb-1997)
    Primal Fear (3-Apr-1996)
    Congo (9-Jun-1995)
    A Simple Twist of Fate (2-Sep-1994)
    Searching for Bobby Fischer (11-Aug-1993)
    Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City (8-May-1993)
    Dave (7-May-1993)
    Lorenzo's Oil (30-Dec-1992)

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