Why We Love...Laura Linney

Something tells us this could be Laura’s year for the Best Actress Oscar

By Kate Torgovnick
Published: Feb 19, 2008
Photography by ©Globe Photos

There are many reasons to be thrilled the writer's strike is, at least for now, over. For one, perhaps the networks will stop their desperate grope for reality television shows. Second, maybe we'll actually get some closure on the shows that started the season with a bang and have since been looping in reruns. But perhaps the most exciting is that the 80th Annual Academy Awards are a go, great for office pool gamblers and red-carpet droolers everywhere. It's also good news for Laura Linney fans, like ourselves, who are crossing our fingers that this will be the year Laura, the everywoman of Hollywood, will hear her name called for Best Actress.

See, Laura Linney isn't flashy. She isn't mega-famous. In fact, the average person outside of New York, Los Angeles or Chicago probably couldn't pick her out of a lineup of pretty blondes. Her face doesn't seem genetically fated for Hollywood, and she's not the type of celebrity the tabloids pay any attention to. Laura is simply one thing: consistent. She's 43 and has been working in film for a relatively short 15 years. In that time Laura has picked up three Oscar nominations, two Best Actress and one Best Supporting. In other words, Laura Linney is good.

The great-great granddaughter of a Senator and the daughter of a playwright named Romulus, Laura grew up on Manhattan's Upper East Side. But her life was far from an episode of Gossip Girl. "I grew up in the theater," she's said. "By the time I was in high school, I knew I wanted to be a part of the theater in some way. It took me a long time to actually fess up and say, 'I want to be an actress.'" In the meantime, Laura was an uber-student. She attended both Northwestern and Brown, and taught deaf and autistic students before she headed to Juilliard to study acting.

In the early '90s, Laura decided to try her hand at film and television. "When I first came to Los Angeles, I had my lovely list of theater credits. My resume was golden in my mind. I had worked regionally, I'd worked on Broadway. A casting director looked at my resume and said, 'You really haven't done anything, have you?' I was dumbstruck," she told the Toronto Sun.

Being shy didn't help. "I have the Cindy Brady complex," Laura once said in Movieline. "You know that episode of the Brady Bunch where Cindy goes catatonic when she appears on TV? That was me. I always fear the camera is going to see everything bad about me. It's taken me a while to realize the camera is not some scary medical device."

For the next few years, Laura played bit parts like "Young Teacher," "Woman" and "School Teacher." Then in 1998, when she was 35 (over-the-hill in Hollywood years), she landed the part of Jim Carrey's wife in the Truman Show. Critics instantly loved Laura as a woman desperate not to let her husband know that his entire life is meticulously choreographed, filmed, and watched all over the world.

Two years later, Laura starred in You Can Count on Me, a quiet film about a brother and sister in a small town. The movie launched both her and Mark Ruffalo into the spotlight. In You Can Count on Me, Laura is wonderfully likeable, the kind of woman who can ask a priest, "What is the church's official position on fornication?" and get a grin from him. "The script is the best I've ever worked with," Laura said at the time. "There's just so much in there for us all to use. A lot of times, you make movies and you do the best you can, but the foundation really isn't there for you. In this case, that is certainly not true."

After being nominated for an Oscar for the role, higher profile parts started to roll Laura's way, from Mystic River and Love, Actually, to a stint on Frasier as the blowhard therapist's love interest. In 2004, Laura co-starred in Kinsey, and got another Oscar nod. A year later, Laura appeared in The Squid and the Whale, another low-key family drama about a couple with two kids calling it quits, and cemented her status as an indie queen.

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