Marcia Gay Harden

Marcia Gay Harden (born August 14, 1959, La Jolla, California, U.S.) is an American actress who is known for her ability to play a wide variety of characters in movies, onstage, and on television.

Harden was the daughter of an American naval officer, and during her childhood she spent time in Texas, Japan, Germany, Italy, and Greece. She began taking courses in theatre while living in Europe and later studied drama at the University of Texas (B.A., 1980) and at New York University (M.F.A., 1988). Harden began her acting career in Washington, D.C., where she was nominated for Helen Hayes Awards in 1985 and 1986 for her performances in the Beth Henley plays Crimes of the Heart and The Miss Firecracker Contest, respectively.

Harden’s first film role was a small part in the virtually unseen thriller The Imagemaker (1986). She won favourable notice for her performance as the tough-talking girlfriend of a mobster in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Miller’s Crossing (1990) and for her portrayal of Ava Gardner in the biographical TV miniseries Sinatra (1992). Her film career failed to ignite, however, and she spent the next several years alternating guest roles in TV shows with appearances in mostly minor movies. She played a malevolent seductress in the drama Crush (1992) and a simple-minded waitress in The Spitfire Grill (1996). Harden continued acting onstage, and in 1993 she made her Broadway debut, playing the troubled wife of a gay Mormon lawyer in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. She was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance.

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Harden later appeared in the film comedies The First Wives Club (1996) and Flubber (1997), in which she played opposite Robin Williams, as well as in the drama Meet Joe Black (1998), loosely based on Death Takes a Holiday (1934), and in Clint Eastwood’s adventure movie Space Cowboys (2000). Harden’s performance as the gifted artist Lee Krasner, wife of Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock, in the biopic Pollock (2000) earned her the Academy Award for best supporting actress.

Harden later appeared in the minor comedy Gaudi Afternoon (2001) and the television movie King of Texas (2002), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear starring Patrick Stewart. She also starred with Richard Dreyfuss in the short-lived TV series The Education of Max Bickford (2001–02). Harden was nominated for an Oscar for her performance as the wife of the character played by Tim Robbins in Eastwood’s Mystic River (2003). Her later films included Bad News Bears (2005), Lasse Hallström’s The Hoax (2006), Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007), and the horror movie The Mist (2007). She also appeared in film adaptations (2015, 2017, and 2018) of the Fifty Shades series of erotic novels by E.L. James.

During this time Harden continued to appear on television, and in 2007 she was nominated for an Emmy Award for her performance in a recurring guest part (2005–13) in the series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. She received another Emmy nod for her role as the mother of the title character (played by Anna Paquin) in the TV movie The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler (2009). In 2009 she earned a Tony Award for her starring role in God of Carnage (2009–10). Harden played recurring characters in the TV series The Newsroom in 2013–14 and How to Get Away with Murder in 2015. She later starred in the medical drama series Code Black (2015–18). In 2019 Harden appeared in the true-crime TV movie Love You to Death, and that year saw the debut of The Morning Show, in which she portrayed a reporter. She then was cast in Barkskins (2020), a limited series based on Annie Proulx’s novel of the same name. In the comedy series Uncoupled (2022– ), Harden played a socialite whose husband leaves her for a much younger woman.

In 2018 Harden published The Seasons of My Mother: A Memoir of Love, Family, and Flowers, which centres on her relationship with her mother, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer disease in 2009.

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