Laura Linney

Laura Linney is in Summer, 1976 on Broadway.

Laura Leggett Linney was born on February 5, 1964 in Manhattan, New York. She is an accomplished stage and screen actress who has four Tony Award nominations, three Academy Award nominations, two Golden Globe wins and four Emmy Award wins to her name.

Linney graduated from Northfield Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts in 1982 and went on to Northwestern University in Illinois before transferring to study acting at Brown University in Rhode Island. After graduating in 1986, she continued her training at the prestigious Juilliard School in New York City through 1990.

Linney made her Off-Broadway debut for Manhattan Theatre Club in John Patrick Shanley’s Beggars in a House of Plenty at New York City Center in 1991, and she then made her Broadway debut as a replacement for the role of Tess in Lincoln Center Theater’s 1990 premiere of John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation at the Vivian Beaumont Theater. She received her Theatre World Award (and first Drama Desk Award nomination) after originating the role of Grete in Donald Margulies’ Sight Unseen, once again for MTC at New York City Center, in 1992. She would then become a regular performer on Broadway throughout the 1990s, appearing in The Seagull (1992-93), Hedda Gabler (1994), Holiday (1995-96), and Honour (1998). In 2000, she starred as Yelena Andreyevna in Uncle Vanya and then took on the coveted role of Elizabeth Proctor in the 2002 revival of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, earning her first Tony Award nomination. She would receive three further Tony nominations in her Broadway career: for the Broadway premiere of Sight Unseen in 2004, for Manhattan Theatre Club’s Time Stands Still in 2010, and for MTC’s The Little Foxes in 2017 (where she alternated the roles of Regina Giddens and Birdie Hubbard with co-star Cynthia Nixon at each performance, also winning her first Drama Desk Award). Additionally, she starred as La Marquise de Merteuil in the 2008 revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses for Roundabout Theatre Company.

Linney’s film career has also been widely celebrated. She most notably earned Oscar nominations for her performances in You Can Count On Me in 2001, Kinsey in 2005, and The Savages in 2008. Her other most notable film credits include a 2006 Golden Globe-nominated performance in The Squid and the Whale, alongside Congo (1995), Primal Fear (1996), The Truman Show (1998), Mystic River (2003), Love Actually (2003), The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), The Nanny Diaries (2007), Hyde Park on Hudson (2012), Mr. Holmes (2015), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (2016), Sully (2016), and Nocturnal Animals (2016).

On television, Linney has enjoyed equal success, winning a total of four Emmy Awards — for Wild Iris in 2002, for Frasier in 2004, for John Adams in 2008, and for The Big C in 2013. She also won Golden Globes for her roles in John Adams and The Big C in 2009 and 2011, respectively. Since 2017, she has starred as Wendy Byrde in Netflix’s Ozark, earning an Emmy Award nomination in 2019.

Linney made her London stage debut at the Bridge Theatre in June 2018 in the one-woman show My Name Is Lucy Barton, later reprising the role for an encore performance at the venue in January 2019. Manhattan Theatre Club presented the American premiere of the solo show at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre from January 4 through February 29, 2020.

In 2023, she returned to MTC to star in the new Broadway play Summer, 1976 opposite Jessica Hecht.