Laura Linney

Laura Leggett Linney (born February 5, 1964) is an American actress. A three-time Academy Award nominee and three-time Tony Award nominee, she won her first Emmy Award in 2002 for Wild Iris (2001), and had subsequent wins for Frasier (2003–04) and John Adams (2008). From 2010–13, she starred in the Showtime series The Big C, which won her a fourth Emmy in 2013. She is also a two-time Golden Globe Award winner.

Linney made her Broadway debut in 1990, before going on to receive Tony Award nominations for the 2002 revival of The Crucible and the original Broadway productions of Sight Unseen (2004) and Time Stands Still (2010). She made her screen debut in the 1992 film Lorenzo’s Oil, and went on to receive Academy Award nominations for You Can Count on Me (2000), Kinsey (2004) and The Savages (2007). Her other films include Primal Fear (1996), The Truman Show (1998), Mystic River (2003), Love Actually (2003) and The Squid and the Whale (2005).

Early Life and Education

Linney was born in Manhattan. Her mother, Miriam Anderson “Ann” Perse (née Leggett), was a nurse who worked at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and her father, Romulus Zachariah Linney IV (1930-2011), was a well-known playwright and professor. Linney’s paternal great-great-grandfather was Republican U.S. Congressman Romulus Zachariah Linney. Linney grew up in modest circumstances, living with her mother in a small one-bedroom apartment. She has a half-sister, Susan, from her father’s second marriage.

She is a 1982 graduate of Northfield Mount Hermon School, an elite preparatory school in New England, for which she currently serves as the chair of the Arts Advisory Council. She then attended Northwestern University before transferring to Brown University, where she studied acting with Jim Barnhill and John Emigh and served on the board of Production Workshop, the university’s student theatre group. During her senior year at Brown, she performed in one of her father’s plays as Lady Ada Lovelace in a production of Childe Byron, a drama in which Ada’s father, the poet Lord Byron, mends a taut, distant relationship with his daughter. Linney graduated from Brown in 1986. She went on to study acting at the Juilliard School as a member of Group 19 (1986–1990), which also included Jeanne Tripplehorn. Linney later received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Juilliard when she delivered the school’s commencement address in 2009.

Opening Night Apr 19, 2017 – Closed Jun 18, 2017

Samuel J Friedman Theatre NYC

The Little Foxes is a 1939 play by Lillian Hellman, considered a classic of 20th century drama. Its title comes from Chapter 2, Verse 15 of the Song of Solomon in the King James version of the Bible, which reads, “Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.” Set in a small town in Alabama in 1900, it focuses on the struggle for control of a family business. Tallulah Bankhead starred in the original production as Regina Hubbard Giddens.