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.
She continues working steadily and garnering great critical respect throughout the next decade. In addition to returning for
Further Tales of the City, she was one of the many talented actors who appeared in the controversial
The Laramie Project. She had a few big-budget films that missed their mark in
The Mothman Prophecies and
The Life of David Gale, but those came around the same time as her superb turn as
Sean Penn's wife in
Mystic River, and as one of the few Americans in the very British romantic comedy
Love Actually. She continued to earn strong reviews as the headstrong wife to
Liam Neeson's
Kinsey, and in 2005 offered a subtle but penetrating portrayal of a selfish mother and divorcee opposite
Jeff Daniels in
The Squid and the Whale. The next year she acted opposite
Robin Williams in
Barry Levinson's political and social satire
Man of the Year.
In 2007 Linney offered a spot-on portrayal of a dissatisfied Manhatten 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 Seymoure Hoffman as her brother, Linney scored her third Academy Award nomination. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide