Laura Linney Movies and Career Information

Laura Leggett Linney (born February 5, 1964) is an American actress of film, television, and theatre. Linney has won three Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. She has been nominated for the Academy Award three times and once for the BAFTA Award. She has also been nominated three times for a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play. She currently stars in the Showtime original series, The Big C with Oliver Platt. Linney was born in Manhattan. Her mother, Miriam Anderson "Ann" Perse (née Leggett), is a nurse who worked at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, and her father, Romulus Linney, is a well-known playwright and professor. Linney's paternal great-great-grandfather was Republican U.S. Congressman Romulus Zachariah Linney. Despite her pedigree, Linney grew up living with her mother in a small one-bedroom apartment in modest circumstances after her parents' divorce. 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 studied acting with