Laura Leggett Linney born February 5, [ 1 ] is an American actress. On television, she won her first Emmy Award for the television film Wild Iris , and had subsequent wins for the sitcom Frasier β and the miniseries John Adams From to , she starred in the Showtime series The Big C , which won her a fourth Emmy in , and from to she starred in the Netflix crime series Ozark.
Holmes , Sully and Nocturnal Animals both Linney was born in Manhattan , New York City. Linney spent summers with her father in New Hampshire and fell in love with the stage, working with the local theatre group beginning at the age of eleven. Congressman Romulus Zachariah Linney. She has a half-sister named Susan from her father's second marriage. Linney is a graduate of Northfield Mount Hermon School , a preparatory school in Massachusetts which she 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 theater group.
Linney graduated from Brown in From a naive, idealistic artist's groupie with a streak of crazy determination, her Nina emerges as a woman who is a lot stronger and more complicated than the terminally wounded bird-woman that is the character's traditional interpretation.
Though deeply embittered at the end of the play, she is also fortified by a hard-won self-knowledge. Miss Linney projects the character's ambiguities with stinging force and clarity. She is clearly a talent of enormous potential. Linney first appeared in minor roles in a few early s films, including Lorenzo's Oil , Searching for Bobby Fischer , and Dave She played a blonde American singer who successfully claimed " battered woman syndrome " as a defense to the murder of a Japanese businessman.
