Laura Liggett Linney aka Laura biography

Real biography: Life Story

Linney was born in New York City, the daughter of Ann Perse (née Leggett), a nurse who worked at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, and Romulus Linney, a well-known playwright and professor.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 in 1995. They divorced in 2000. As of 2007, she is engaged to to Marc Schauer.

Career

Linney appeared in minor roles in a few early 1990s films, including Dave in 1993 before coming to prominence in the public television mini-series Tales of the City. She was then cast in a series of high-profile thrillers, including Congo, Primal Fear and Absolute Power. In 2000, she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in the lower-budget film You Can Count on Me. In 2003, Linney appeared in several notable films, including Mystic River, Love Actually and The Life of David Gale. Her 2004 performance in Kinsey, as the title character's wife, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. In 2005, Linney starred in The Exorcism of Emily Rose (a horror movie and courtroom drama), and the very well-reviewed comedy-drama, The Squid and the Whale, for which she received a Golden Globe nomination for "Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy". 2006 saw Linney appearing in the Robin Williams political satire Man of the Year and the comedy Driving Lessons (starring Rupert Grint of Harry Potter fame). In 2007, Linney appeared in the spy thriller Breach, The Nanny Diaries, opposite Scarlett Johansson and based on the book by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, and The Savages, where Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman played siblings.

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?"