Getting to Know Laura Linney

With The Miracle Club now available on disc, Cinema Paradiso takes the opportunity to get to know its American star, Laura Linney.

It's apt that Laura Linney should have acted with Maggie Smith in one of the latter's final films, as they each excel at playing women who don't quite fit. Linney's characters often appear to be in control and have the outward appearance of happiness. But their stresses and insecurities slowly rise to the surface, as the sheer effort of suppressing turmoil becomes too much to bear.

Such roles don't pigeonhole Linney - she's not been called the next Meryl Streep for nothing. But what makes them so distinctive is not the type of women she portrays, but the sincerity with which she plays them and the truths she finds in their lives. That's why she's been nominated for five Tony Awards and three Oscars and has two Golden Globes and four Primetime Emmys to her credit.

You won't find Linney in the gossip columns or beaming from the covers of glossy lifestyle magazines. Again, like Maggie Smith, she's no great lover of celebrity. Indeed, she's glad that people know so little about her and plans to keep it that way. But she's passionate about her work on stage and screen and that shall be our primary focus.

Latchkey Kid

Laura Leggett Linney was born in Manhattan on 5 February 1964. Five months later, her parents divorced and she grew up with her mother, Miriam Anderson Perse (née Leggett), who was a nurse at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. However, she got to spend weekends and summers with her father, Romulus Zachariah Linney IV, an academic and playwright, whose ancestor of the same name had been a Republican Congressman at the turn of the century.

Laura had a half-sister, Susan, from her father's second marriage. But she spent the majority of her time in a one-room apartment with her mother, who was known as Ann. 'My mother was balancing so much,' Linney later reflected, 'she was remarkable - she did not have an easy time. She was working 12-hour shifts at the hospital. And she was so young, she had me at 24. I often think of what it must have been like for her.' Linney told another interviewer, 'I watched her work long, hard hours and struggle to raise a child on her own. It had a big impact on me - so did the depth to which she dedicated herself to her patients.'

But she enjoyed the independence of being a latchkey kid. 'I would get myself to school,' she explained, 'and I remember taking great pride in being self-sufficient.' She has fond memories of trips to Central Park, local movie theatres, and a nearby bowling alley, as well as the gymnastics class she took at a neighbourhood gym. 'We were all sort of wild childs,' she recalled. 'We were all running all over the place, in ways that would be shocking to people today.' A favourite haunt was the Frick Museum. 'We were running around the Frick a lot,' Linney once confided. 'I'm sure we drove them all crazy.'

Among her friends at grade school was child star Brooke Shields. However, they often had to hide from her mother/manager, Teri, who could be unpredictable when drunk. While Shields was modelling and being put forward for acting roles, Linney was content to work backstage at the New London Barn Playhouse when she spent the summer with her father in New Hampshire. 'I was painfully young,' Linney recalled, 'living every second of it. You couldn't have dragged me away. I was like a fish in water.'

Her love of acting didn't come entirely from Romulus, however. Paternal grandmother Maitland Lagrange Thompson Clabaugh took drama and elocution lessons at a time when polite young ladies did not go on the stage. She entrusted Linney with the gold medal she had won in 1921 and this was the one possession she was relieved to recover when her house in Connecticut burned down in 2000. Trips to see her maternal grandparents at their seaside home in Georgia were also treasured. 'I remember picnics,' Linney reminisced, 'digging for sand dollars, seeing cousins, being in houses when hurricanes were coming through.'

Her relatives helped pay the fees when Linney enrolled at the prestigious Northfield Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts. It was here that she made her acting debut in Preston Jones's Lu Ann Oberlander. But she was determined to complete her education before making any decisions about a career in show business. Having put in long night-time shifts in the library to boost her grades, Linney transferred from Northwestern University to Brown University, where she studied acting under Jim Barnhill and John Emigh. In addition to serving on the board of the student theatre group, Production Workshop, Linney also played Lady Ada Lovelace in Childe Byron, a senior year staging of one of her father's plays about the relationship between the poet, Lord Byron, and the mathematician daughter who is considered to have been the world's first computer programmer.

A Late Bloomer

Having graduated from Brown in 1986, Linney spent the next three years studying acting at the Juilliard School, which meant that she remained in full-time education until she was 26. Jeanne Tripplehorn was a classmate, but it was Linney's audition that stayed with administrative director Harold Stone. 'She did the first audition on the first day of the first weekend of solid auditioning,' he recalled. 'One never has high expectations at that point in the process. She walked into the room and I thought, "Wow!" She was like a burst of sunshine. And she proceeded in the first 30 seconds of her audition to blow the panel away.'

Linney recalls the incident slightly differently. 'I went second,' she corrected. 'Before me there was a woman who went in with a wig stand and a sword! It put me at ease. It made me laugh. I thought the chances for me were so slim, I'd just go for the experience.' But the course was anything but a breeze, as Linney had to unlearn the respect for a text that her father had taught her. 'It took pretty much the full period of training for her to make a script hers,' Stone divulged, 'to use it fully and creatively. And once she was able to do that, nothing could stop her.'

Yet, even after all that soul-searching and effort, Linney almost walked away from the profession after she got stage fright during a production of George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House. 'Something happened,' she remembered, 'and I just didn't want to be there anymore. My concentration was shot, and I became horribly self-conscious. I had a real crisis of faith, I mean, like, maybe I'm not meant to do this.' However, a short spell at the Arts Theatre School in Moscow restored her confidence. 'Everything that had rusted shut started to move again. My actor brain woke up.'

The first play Linney was offered after graduation was one of her father's. But she was determined not to trade on his name and turned it down. 'Given who we both are,' she explained in an interview, 'I didn't think it was the right thing to do. I just wasn't comfortable with it. I didn't want to be identified as Romulus Linney's daughter, who's got into the business because of him. I had worked very, very hard. I was independent.'

Instead, she spent a year as an understudy for the role of Tess in John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation (1990-92), a part that was played by Catherine Kellner in Fred Schepisi's 1993 film version. She finally made her debut as Grete in Donald Margulies's Sight Unseen in January 1992, only for the play to close after three months. She had more luck as Nina in an Off-Broadway presentation of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull (1990), which prompted the critic from The New York Times to opine, 'She is clearly a talent of enormous potential.'

Between these engagements, Linney got her first experience of acting before the camera, when she was cast as a young teacher in George Miller's Lorenzo's Oil (1992). She made such a good impression as Lily Magraw in Gregory Hoblit's Steven Spielberg-produced Civil War teleplay, Class of '61, that she was cast alongside Joanne Woodward and Allison Janney in Michael Toshiyuki Uno's Blind Spot. Also in 1993, Linney appeared as another unnamed teacher in Steven Zaillian's directorial debut, Innocent Moves (aka Searching For Bobby Fischer), and Randi, the White House staffer with whom President Bill Mitchell (Kevin Kline) is having an affair Ivan Reitman's Dave.

Her most notable assignment of 1993, however, took her to 1970s San Francisco, as wide-eyed Cleveland innocent Mary Ann Singleton in the TV adaptation of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City. Sporting a red, white, and blue outfit that made her look like an air hostess, Mary Ann became a fixture alongside pot-growing transgender landlady Anna Madrigal (Olympia Dukakis), the gay Michael 'Mouse' Tolliver (Marcus D'Amico), the sexually fluid DeDe Halcyon Day (Barbara Garrick), and the bisexual Mona Ramsey (Chloe Webb). Indeed, Linney became something of a gay icon and returned for More Tales of the City (1998), Further Tales of the City (2001), and the Netflix reboot, Tales of the City (2019).

Despite being in demand, Linney found acting to a lens challenging. 'Cameras scare me,' she admitted. 'But the technical aspects of working in film and TV, telling a story in a disjointed way, I find interesting and fun.' So, she signed up to play Nancy Lambert Newland in Gillies MacKinnon's A Simple Twist of Fate (1994), an updating of George Eliot's Silas Marner that sees furniture maker Michael McCann (Steve Martin) adopt the illegitimate daughter of politician John Newland (Gabriel Byrne). Linney also appeared as Martha Bowen, a singer charged with the murder of a Japanese business man, in the 1994 'Blue Bamboo' episode of Law & Order (1993-). But she continued to feel most at home on stage, where she was acclaimed for her performances as Thea Elvsted in Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (1994) and Linda Seton in Philip Barry's Holiday (1995), the role that Katharine Hepburn had taken opposite Cary Grant in George Cukor's Holiday (1938).

Into the Limelight

While getting used to life on a set, as opposed to a stage, Linney had avoided genre projects. In 1995, however, she was cast as electronics expert, Dr Karen Ross, who goes in search of the fiancé who had gone missing on an expedition to the lost city of Zinj, in Frank Marshall's Congo, which had been adapted from a bestseller by Michael Crichton.

'Congo was fun,' Linney once claimed in an interview. 'It was actually very important for me, that movie. There was no acting required for that. There was no great work on the script; you didn't really have to do a lot except run from gorillas and hold a gun, but what it allowed me, because it was such a long shoot, it was six months. Yeah, because I really didn't know much about film and it was my first time on a movie for such a long period of time, I went from department to department. I spent like three weeks hanging out with each department just to learn what everybody was doing. So I'd hang out with the camera department and then I'd hang out with props and then I'd hang out with sound. I just loitered. Just so I could see how all the pieces fit together. And then you learn what's your job and what's not your job.'

She knew her stuff, therefore, by the time she came to reunite with Gregory Hoblit in order to play Chicago prosecutor Janet Venable opposite swaggering defence attorney Martin Vail (Richard Gere) in Primal Fear (1996). It also meant that Linney could hold her own against Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, and Ed Harris, as she played Kate, the daughter of art thief Luther Whitney, who is being framed for the shooting of a billionaire's wife in Absolute Power (1997).

Moreover, familiarising herself with the mechanics of screen artifice helped Linney prepare to play Hannah Gill, the actress cast as Meryl, the wife of Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey), the man who is blithely unaware that he is the star of a reality TV series, in Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998). But there were limits to what those assembled around the magic box could do, as Linney explained. 'Someone once wanted me to play Mother Teresa. It was a long time ago, actually, after The Truman Show. It was a television movie. I just laughed, I laughed for a half-hour. I mean, c'mon. I'm almost 5-foot-8 and very blonde. It's hysterical. They were going to put prosthetic makeup on me. I just had this image of me, you know - she was like 4-10 or something. Tiny, little…it was just so funny.'

Just so you know, Geraldine Chaplin took the role in Kevin Connor's Mother Teresa: In the Name of God's Poor (1997), and she's 5ft 5in. Cinema Paradiso users can rent the teleplay to see how she got on.

Such was the acclaim for Linney's turn in the demanding duel role in a picture that took $125 million at the box office that people started talking about her as the next big thing. Looking back, she is able to take the fact that she didn't enter the stratosphere in her stride. 'You learn a very good lesson: do not expect anything,' she mused. 'I've always been very good at that. I've never expected much. The Truman Show, because it was so big and was so successful, there were great expectations for what I would do next. But it just didn't happen. It was disappointing as the hype was so big.'

Instead of being cast in sci-fi blockbusters or headline-grabbing dramas, however, Linney got to star in the final film made by Hollywood legend, Stanley Donen. Adapted by A.R. Gurney from his own play, Love Letters chronicles the relationship between ambitious US Senator Andrew Ladd (Steven Webber) and his adored correspondent, Melissa Gardner Cobb. Linney would follow this with another small-scale drama, as Rachel Van Dyke finds herself keeping company with golfer Lionel Exley (Campbell Scott) and drunken author W. Firmin Carter in first-timer Mark Gibson's little-seen, Lush (both 1999).

Linney fared better with another directorial debut, as she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as Samantha Prescott in Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count on Me (2000). She excels as the single mother who temporarily goes off the rails while trying to raise son Rudy (Rory Culkin) in a small Catskills town and keep visiting brother Terry (Mark Ruffalo) out of trouble. Yet, the critics weren't so kind when she returned to Broadway as Yelena in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, with the New York Times review comparing her to 'a gym teacher who all but shouts most of her lines'.

This wasn't an easy time out of the limelight, either, as Linney's five-year marriage to actor David Adkins was coming to an end. Moreover, she was having to contend with a stalker, who kept sending her letters, presents, and photographs. As Linney recalled, 'He infiltrated every area of my life. Everywhere I would show up, there would be flowers. I mean everywhere I showed up. I went to Alaska - I was teaching - and he found out, and there were flowers.' After he wrote to her mother, Linney called in the police and all contact ended. But she no longer discusses any aspects of her private life with journalists to avoid providing the stalker or any copycats with clues they could exploit.

A Little Bit of Everything

Linney hit a rich vein of form around the turn of the century after she played Bertha Dorset, the adulterous socialite who invites the impoverished Lily Bart (Gillian Anderson) on a yachting holiday in Euope in Terence Davies's splendid adaptation of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. However, few got to see Linney as the pregnant girlfriend of a doctor working in Africa who falls for his best friend, an artist with Tourette's, in Rob Morrow's Maze.

American TV audiences alone got to admire Linney's Lauren Hartman managing the presidential campaign of womanising Michigan Governor James Reynolds Pryce (Tom Selleck) in Ron Lagomarsino's Running Mates (2000). But she was more widely seen after winning an Emmy for her performance in Daniel Petrie's Wild Iris (2002), as Iris Bravard, a single mom who takes to drink while having to cope with her husband's suicide and the judgemental opinions of her unpredictable mother (Gena Rowlands). Nevertheless, neither film was released on disc in the UK, which is a shame, as they afford Linney an opportunity to demonstrate her range.

Having contributed the voice of Marlene to the 'Dang Ol' Love' episode of King of the Hill (1997-2005), Linney sang 'Please Can I Keep It?' on Philadelphia Chickens, a 2002 CD for children that also included turns by Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, and Patti LuPone. She also reunited with Richard Gere to play Connie Mills, the sheriff of Point Pleasant, West Virginia who takes exception to a reporter's obsessive investigation in Mark Pellington's The Mothman Prophecies.

Also in 2002, Linney joined the stellar ensemble, as university administrator Sherry Johnson, in Moisés Kaufman's The Laramie Project, which reflects on the true-life 1998 homophobic murder of 21 year-old Matthew Shepard. The stage also beckoned, as she was paired with Liam Neeson as John and Elizabeth Proctor in a Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's The Crucible that earned Linney a Tony nomination.

As DeathWatch activist Constance Harraway, she met a violent end in Alan Parker's The Life of David Gale before receiving a BAFTA nomination for her performance as Annabeth Markum, the devoted wife of the convenience store owner (Sean Penn) whose daughter is murdered in Clint Eastwood's harrowing drama, Mystic River. However, Linney's most fondly remembered role of 2003 came in Richard Curtis's Love Actually, as graphic designer Sarah's long-awaited night of passion with creative director Karl (Rodrigo Santoro) is interrupted by a long-distance phone call about her autistic brother.

Another pitch-perfect performance came in the final season of the original run of Frasier (1993-2004), as Linney spent six episodes as Charlotte Connor, the duplicitous dating agency boss who wins the heart of Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) after their relationship gets off to a bad start. She won the Primetime Emmy for Guest Actress in a Comedy Series, but missed out on the Tony for her work as Patricia in the Broadway revival of Sight Unseen, in which she had appeared 12 years earlier. Frustratingly, Linney also had to be content with Best Supporting nominations at the Oscars, the Golden Globes, and the Screen Actors Guild Awards for her display opposite Liam Neeson as Clara McMillen, the wife and co-researcher of pioneering sexologist Alfred Kinsey in Bill Condon's Kinsey (2004).

Rather getting lost in all these acclaimed outings is Dylan Kidd's P.S. (2004), an involved melodrama that sees university admissions administrator Louise Harrington become convinced that an applicant is the reincarnation of the first love (Topher Grace) who was killed before she married the sex-addicted Peter (Gabriel Byrne). Marital problems also beset Joan Berkman, who embarks upon an affair with the tennis coach (William Baldwin) of her sons, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and Frank (Owen Kline), after she separates from their arrogant academic-cum-author father, Bernard (Jeff Daniels), in Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale. This impeccably written and acted dramedy brought Linney a Golden Globe nomination, although she enjoyed greater box-office success with Scott Derrickson's The Exorcism of Emily Rose (both 2005), an unnerving courtroom drama, in which lawyer Erin Bruner is assigned to defend Catholic priest Fr Richard Moore (Tom Wilkinson) after he is charged with negligent homicide after a 19 year-old student dies during a purgation ritual.

Plain Old Busy

Now firmly established on stage and screen, Linney started to diversify during a busy 2006. She came to Britain to play Laura Marshall, the vicar's wife who cheats on her husband (Nicholas Farrell) and neglects her teenage son (Rupert Grint), while doing strenuously visible good deeds, in Jeremy Brock's Driving Lessons. Then, having voiced Doctor Gupta in the 'Roger'n 'Me' episode of American Dad! (2005-17), she read the words of Danish missionary and eye witness, Maria Jacobsen, in Andrew Goldberg's teledocumentary, Armenian Genocide, which also features Natalie Portman as Aurora Mardiganian, the survivor who became an actress in America and told her story in Ravished Armenia (1919), which also featured in Inna Sahakyan's animated documentary, Aurora's Sunrise (2022), which really should be on disc in the UK.

Linney next went Down Under to play Claire in Ray Lawrence's Jindabyne, an adaptation of a Raymond Carver story that had also featured in Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993). Gabriel Byrne co-stars as her husband, Stewart, who finds the body of a murdered Aboriginal girl while fishing with his pals. Returning Stateside, Linney appeared as Jesse Harding, the mother of a 20 year-old actor (Mark Webber) experiencing first love with a singer (Catalina Sandino Moreno) in Ethan Hawke's adaptation of his own novel, The Hottest State. In another change of pace, she completed the year as Eleanor Green, a whistleblower at a company that manufactures voting machines in Barry Levinson's Man of the Year, a political satire that sees talk show host Robin Williams run for president.

She remained in a darkly comic vein in Tamara Jenkins's The Savages, which brought Linney another Oscar nomination for her performance as Wendy, a struggling playwright who reunites with her estranged academic brother, Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), to care for their father, Lenny (Philip Bosco), who is slipping into dementia in a nursing home in Sun City, Arizona. Another three-way relationship forms in Billy Ray's fact-based espionage thriller, Breach, as FBI handler Kate Burroughs confides in investigator Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillippe) that agent Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper) is spying for the Russians. However, 2007 ended on another comic note, as Linney essayed Mrs Alexandra X, the affluent, but self-obsessed New Yorker who employs college student Annie Braddock (Scarlett Johansson) to look after her mischievous son with ghastly husband, Stan (Paul Giamatti), in Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's take on Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus's bestseller, The Nanny Diaries.

Having played nightmare employees the previous year, Linney and Paul Giamatti joined forces again to excellent effect in Tom Hooper's John Adams (2008), an 7-part chronicle of the life of the Founding Father and second president of the United States and his wife, Abigail. The pair would reprise the roles in Peter Argentine's 2012 short, Enduring Legacy. Among the mini-series's record-breaking 13 Emmy wins was a third award for Linney, who remained in an 18th-century frame of mind to play the Marquise de Merteuil alongside Mamie Gummer and Benjamin Walker in the Broadway revival of Christopher Hampton's play, Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

Her sole big-screen excursion in 2008 was Richard Eyre's The Other Man, an adaptation of a novel by Bernhard Schlink that brought her to Cambridge to play the shoe designer whose frequent trips to Milan had caused her to cheat on her software executive husband (Liam Neeson) with an impoverished building superintendent (Antonio Banderas). Only discovering the truth after he is widowed, the Ulsterman heads to Lake Como seeking revenge.

In 2009, Linney read passages from Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy at We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial. She also played Caroline opposite Anthony Hopkins in James Ivory's The City of Your Final Destination, which was adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from a book by Peter Cameron. Sadly, the director's final feature to date is not available to rent and neither are Mark Ruffalo's directorial bow, Sympathy For Delicious, and Leland Orser's Morning, in which Linney respectively played Nina Hogue, the manager of the Los Angeles punk band joined by paraplegic DJ, Dean O'Dwyer (Christopher Thornton), and Dr Goodman, a grief counsellor trying to help a couple (Orser and Jeanne Triplehorn) come to terms with the death of their young son. Also missing is Jacob Estes's The Details, a study of suburban angst in which Linney's Lila is a cat lady who develops a dangerous crush on new neighbour, Tobey Maguire. Despite the fine cast, however, this edgy drama remained on the shelf for almost three years.

Broadway also beckoned again, as Linney drew a third Tony nomination alongside Brian D'Arcy James and Alicia Silverstone in Donald Margulies's Time Stands Still. But her most significant achievement of this period was The Big C (2010-13), a 40-episode dramedy in which she played Cathy Jamison, a high school teacher suffering from an aggressive form of melanoma that she decides to keep secret from her friends and family. Unafraid over its four seasons to put a macabrely comic spin on serious subjects, this groundbreaking show earned Linney (who doubled as executive producer) a Golden Globe and a fourth Emmy, as well as a further nomination.

When asked what an actor's work is all about, Linney replied: 'Empathy is a large part of it. With big, emotional roles, it's very easy, especially if you've grown up in the American school of acting, to exploit your own pain. You have to be careful about that, because 9 times out of 10, your pain is not appropriate to the character. You can watch someone on stage cry and cry - but in the audience you feel nothing. It's easy to become indulgent. For me, what's important is the story first.' The latter remark would have made her father proud. But Linney lost him in 2011, although her life also changed for the better around this time.

During the Telluride Film Festival in 2007, Linney had been charmed by estate agent Marc Schauer, who had been assigned as her factotum during the event. Liam Neeson gave her away on her wedding day in 2009 and the couple welcomed the arrival of Bennett Armistead Schauer in January 2014, when Linney was approaching her own 50th birthday. 'I had tried for a very long time to have a child,' she later revealed, 'and I realised this was probably my last opportunity. When I made it through the first few months, I just closed the door, sat on my couch, ate a lot of cheese and fruit, watched a lot of bad television - and threw up.'

Doing Her Own Thing

By this stage in her career, Linney could pretty much pick and choose her assignments. Increasingly, she based her decisions as much on her collaborators as on the character she would play or the storyline. She admits she has a preference for working with 'people who are like-minded and have a similar taste, and a similar definition of what's good. Because what's good to someone is terrible to someone else and if you're working with people who don't want what you have to offer, that is demoralising and a very lonely feeling. You just want to crawl into a hole.'

In 2011, Linney was entrusted with introducing American audiences to Downton Abbey (2010-15), as the host of Masterpiece, a showcase that had a reputation for unearthing British TV gold. Then, having voiced the North Pole Computer in Sarah Smith's Aardman animation, Arthur Christmas (2011), she gave a fine account of herself as Margaret Suckley, the distant cousin who becomes more than an assistant to President Franklin D. Roosevelt (Bill Murray) during a visit by King George VI (Samuel West) and Queen Elizabeth (Olivia Colman) in Roger Mitchell's Hyde Park on Hudson (2012).

Having taken the supporting role of Deputy Undersecretary of State, Sarah Shaw, alongside stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange and Daniel Brühl as Daniel Domscheit-Berg, in Bill Condon's WikiLeaks saga, The Fifth Estate (2013), Linney and the director reunited on Mr Holmes (2015), in which she played housekeeper Mrs Munro to Ian McKellen's ageing sleuth. She also settled for the supporting role of Louise Perkins in Michael Grandage's Genius, which centred on the relationships between editor Maxwell Perkins (Colin Firth) and his most famous authors, Thomas Wolfe (Jude Law), Ernest Hemingway (Dominic West), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Guy Pearce).

In a change of tack, Linney cropped up as NYPD chief Rebecca Vincent resenting the assistance of four maverick vigilantes in Dave Green's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows. Following a cameo as Anne Sutton, the mother of book-reading gallery owner Amy Adams, in Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals, she was back in the realms of quality drama for Clint Eastwood's Sully (all 2016), in which she played Lorraine, the worried wife of heroic pilot, Chesley Sullenberger (Tom Hanks), who is investigated after landing a stricken jet liner on the Hudson River.

There was even time for guest slots in Inside Amy Schumer (2016), Red Nose Day Actually, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (both 2017), Sink Sank Sunk, and Bojack Horseman (both 2018), as Linney juggled acting commitments with family life in her homes in Colorado and Connecticut.

On the big screen, she joined Oren Moverman's flashbacking drama, The Dinner (2017), to play Claire, the wife of Paul Lohman (Steve Coogan), a small-town hisory teacher who has upset his brother, Stan (Richard Gere), a congressman who is about to run for state governor. However, she was also in demand on stage, as she received a fourth Tony nomination for alternating the roles of Regina and Birdie Hubbard with Cynthia Nixon in a 2017 revival of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes. 'I'm most comfortable on the stage,' Linney revealed around this time. 'I love how demanding it is of your concentration, of your body, of your voice, of your mind, of your spirit.' And she certainly put herself to the test in London in 2018 in Rona Munro's monologue adaptation of Elizabeth Strout's novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton, which was directed by Richard Eyre. Two years later, she would bring the one-woman show to New York and land a fifth Tony nomination, as well as the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance.

Frustratingly, Cinema Paradiso is unable to bring you Linney's most memorable achievement from this phase of her career, as Ozark (2017-22) is a Netflix production. Initially, the focus fell on Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman), the Chicago money launderer who is forced to up sticks and move to Missouri after getting his fingers burnt. However, Linney insisted that the character of wife Wendy was beefed up and, over the course of the ongoing series, she began to show her own talent for criminal enterprise and earned Linney a Golden Globe nomination and Emmy nods for the final three series.

Linney made her directorial debut with the Season Four episode, 'Pound of Flesh and Still Kickin''. But acting remains her first love and she paid tribute to one of her Juilliard tutors in Rauzar Alexander's documentary, The Moni Yakim Legacy (2020). The same year also saw her play Hannah in The Great Work Begins. Scenes From Angels in America, a benefit reading of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which is available to rent via Mike Nichols's interpretation, Angels in America (2003), with Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Emma Thompson.

Despite Covid interrupting many productions during this period, Linney got to play Sarah, the sister of John Peterson (Viggo Mortensen), a gay man trying to reconnect with his homophobic father, Willis (Lance Henrickson), in the Mortenson-directed drama, Falling. She would move on to Sally Potter's The Roads Not Taken (both 2020) to play Rita, the ex-wife of Leo (Javier Bardem), the man suffering from dementia whose life is examined through episodes set in New York, Mexico, and Greece.

Back on Broadway, Linney received typically positive notices for David Auburn's Summer, 1976, which ran during the spring of 2023. Later that year, audiences got to see her as prodigal daughter, Chrissie Ahearn, who returns to Ireland for her mother's funeral and winds up joining unforgiving neighbours Lily Fox (Maggie Smith) and Eileen Dunne (Kathy Bates) on a parish pilgrimage to Lourdes in Thadeus O'Sullivan's The Miracle Club.

For now, this is the last Linney release available on disc, as her performances as Regina, the mother of Flannery O'Connor, in Ethan Hawke's Wildcat (2023) and Kristine, the mother of a dying cancer patient in Laura Chinn's Suncoast (2024), have yet to be released. Hopefully, there will be many more titles to come, as the 60 year-old plans to keep acting. Getting older doesn't concern her. 'I believe it's a complete privilege to age,' she insists. 'It's not easy; my knees hurt. You can feel you are not on the pulse of things. However, I have very little patience for people who gripe about ageing. I want to slap some sense into them. I've become very offended on behalf of my friends who did not get to age.'

She's also happy to take on challenging projects: 'What's best for you is the role you didn't quite understand when you first read it; the director who scared you a little bit and you didn't like being around but ended up teaching you more than anyone.' Despite being in the public eye for over 30 years, things can still surprise her. On becoming the 2727th artist to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (at 6533 Hollywood Boulevard), she enthused, 'This is even more overwhelming than I thought it would be...If someone had told me 20 years ago that this camera-shy theatre person would be represented amongst her idols of film and television I would have never believed it. I would simply have deemed it absolute crazy talk, it would have been ludicrous and as puzzling and indecipherable. Even after 30 years I can tell you that on a daily basis I am quietly stunned and not so quietly exhilarated to be embraced, not only by Los Angeles itself, but by the industries, the businesses and the people that call it home. To have my name held and protected by a star on this famous stretch of sidewalk is beyond my wildest dreams.'

Moreover, Linney isn't finished when it comes to being an advocate for all of the arts. 'Much in this world is a waste of time,' she was quoted as saying, 'we squander what is valuable. But you can't go wrong with time spent with and around the arts. Regardless of your profession or your belief system, the arts are just good for you…they make everyone and everything better.' We at Cinema Paradiso couldn't agree more!