Date of Birth : Feb 5th 1964
Academy Award-nominated and Emmy Award-winning American actress, active in movies, television, and theatre.
Laura Linney is the daughter of a respected playwright and nurse. She graduated from Brown University in 1986 and from the Juilliard School in 1990.
Clint Eastwood picked her for the part of Kate Whitney in his new movie Absolute Power (1997) after he saw her performance in Primal Fear (1996). She was nominated for Tony award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play for role in “The Crucible”, May 2002.
Linney’s paternal great-great-grandfather was Republican U.S. Congressman Romulus Zachariah Linney. 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 graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1986. After attending Brown University, Linney went on to study acting at the Juilliard School.
Linney married David Adkins (whom she met at Juilliard) in 1995. They divorced in 2000. As of 2007, she is engaged to Marc Schauer.
Her important television roles include “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. Her extensive stage credits on Broadway and elsewhere include Hedda Gabler (for which she won a 1994 Joe A. Callaway Award), Holiday (based on the movie starring Katharine Hepburn), and she was nominated for a Tony Award in 2002 as Best Actress (Play) for The Crucible, and again in 2005 for Sight Unseen.
Linney also appears on the Sandra Boynton’s children’s CD, Philadelphia Chickens, on which she sings “Please Can I Keep It?”