Laura Linney is an award-winning American actress of film, television and theater.
Linney has received three Academy Award nominations: for her performances in Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me, alongside Mark Ruffalo and Matthew Broderick; in Bill Condon’s Kinsey, opposite Liam Neeson; and in Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages, with Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Her performance in You Can Count on Me also earned her Screen Actors Guild, Golden Globe Award and Independent Spirit Award nominations and Best Actress awards from the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics. For Kinsey, she also garnered her Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award nominations, as well as the National Board of Review’s award for Best Supporting Actress. Her performance in The Savages additionally brought her a London Critics’ Circle Film Award nomination for Best Actress, among other honors.
Linney won a Golden Globe Award and received an Emmy Award nomination for her starring role as Cathy Jamison on the Showtime television series The Big C, on which she was also an executive producer. She starred opposite Paul Giamatti as First Lady Abigail Adams in the critically acclaimed HBO miniseries John Adams, directed by Tom Hooper, for which she won Screen Actors Guild, Golden Globe, and Emmy Awards. She has also won Emmy Awards for her guest role on the final season of the NBC comedy Frasier, opposite Kelsey Grammer, and for her performance in the Showtime telefilm Wild Iris, in which she starred with Gena Rowlands and Emile Hirsch for director Daniel Petrie.
Starring opposite Jason Bateman, she has garnered critical acclaim — and multiple Emmy nominations — for her performance in the Netflix drama Ozark.
Linney’s other feature-film credits include The Fifth Estate, which reunited her with Kinsey director Bill Condon; Roger Michell’s Hyde Park on Hudson; Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, opposite Jeff Daniels, for which she received Golden Globe and Independent Spirit Award nominations; Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River, for which she received a BAFTA Award nomination and Absolute Power; Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, with Jim Carrey; Gregory Hoblit’s Primal Fear and Mark Pellington’s The Mothman Prophecies, both opposite Richard Gere; Richard Curtis’ Love Actually; George Miller’s Lorenzo’s Oil; Ivan Reitman’s Dave; Steven Zaillian’s Searching for Bobby Fischer; Gillies MacKinnon’s A Simple Twist of Fate; Frank Marshall’s Congo; and Terence Davies’ The House of Mirth.
She also appeared in several made-for-television movies, including Michael Uno’s Blind Spot, with Joanne Woodward; and Stanley Donen’s Love Letters, opposite Steven Weber.
Also for television, Linney memorably starred as Mary Ann Singleton in three Tales of the City miniseries, based on the novels by Armistead Maupin, and directed respectively by Alastair Reid and Pierre Gang.
The Juilliard graduate was recently a Drama Desk and Tony Award nominee for Time Stands Still, written by Donald Margulies and directed by Daniel Sullivan. She previously starred on Broadway in, among other shows, the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses with Ben Daniels, directed by Rufus Norris; Richard Eyre’s staging of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, opposite Liam Neeson, for which she was a Tony Award nominee; Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, staged by Sarah Anderson, for which she won a 1994 Calloway Award; and Donald Margulies’ Sight Unseen, staged by Daniel Sullivan, for which she received her first Tony Award nomination. She had starred off-Broadway in the latter play over a decade earlier, earning her first Drama Desk Award nomination as well as Drama League and Outer Critic Circle Award nominations, and a Theatre World award.
