Cynthia Nixon
Cynthia Ellen Nixon (born April 9, 1966) is an American actress, activist, and theater director. For her portrayal of Miranda Hobbes in the HBO series Sex and the City (1998–2004), she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series and reprised the role in the films Sex and the City (2008) and Sex and the City 2 (2010), as well as the television show And Just Like That... (2021–present).
Cynthia Nixon
- Actress
- activist
- theatre director
1979–present
Danny Mozes (1988–2003)
3
Nixon made her Broadway debut in the 1980 revival of The Philadelphia Story. She went on to receive two Tony Awards, the first for Best Actress in a Play for Rabbit Hole (2006) and the second for Best Featured Actress in a Play for The Little Foxes (2017). Her other Broadway credits include The Real Thing (1983), Hurlyburly (1983), Indiscretions (1995), The Women (2001), and Wit (2012).
She won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in 2008 and a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for An Inconvenient Truth in 2009. She acted in the films Amadeus (1984), James White (2015), and A Quiet Passion (2016). She portrayed Eleanor Roosevelt in Warm Springs (2005), Michele Davis in Too Big to Fail (2011), and Nancy Reagan in Killing Reagan (2016). Her other television credits include The Big C (2010–2011), Ratched (2020), and The Gilded Age (2022–present).
In 2018 Nixon ran for Governor of New York as part of the Working Families Party challenging Democratic incumbent Andrew Cuomo. She went on to lose the Democratic primary to Cuomo on September 13, 2018, with 34% of the vote to his 66%. Nixon has been an advocate for LGBT rights in the United States, particularly the right of same-sex marriage.[1][2] She met her wife at a 2002 gay rights rally, and announced her engagement at a rally for New York same-sex marriage in 2009.[3] She received the Visibility Award from the Human Rights Campaign in 2018.[4]
Early life and education[edit]
Nixon was born in Manhattan, the only child of Walter Elmer Nixon Jr., a radio journalist from Texas,[5][6][7] and Anne Elizabeth (née Knoll),[8] an actress originally from Chicago.[9][10] She credits her mother with "indoctrinating" her into theatre.[11] She is of English and German descent.[12][13] Her grandparents were Adolph Knoll, Etta Elizabeth Williams, Walter E. Nixon, and Grace Truman McCormack.[14][15][16] Nixon's parents divorced when she was six years old.[9] According to Nixon, her father was often unemployed[9] and her mother was the household's main breadwinner:[10] Nixon's mother worked on the game show To Tell the Truth, coaching the "impostors" who claimed to be the person described by the host.
Nixon was an actress all through her years at Hunter College Elementary School and Hunter College High School (class of 1984), often taking time away from school to perform in film and on stage.[17][18] Nixon also acted in order to pay her way through Barnard College, where she received a B.A.[19] in English Literature.[20] Nixon was also a student in the Semester at Sea Program in the Spring of 1986.[21]
Career[edit]
1979–1997: Early roles and theatre work[edit]
Nixon's first onscreen appearance was as an imposter on To Tell the Truth, where her mother worked, at 8, pretending to be a junior horse riding champion.[22] [9][23][24] She began acting at 12 as the object of a wealthy schoolmate's crush in The Seven Wishes of a Rich Kid, a 1979 ABC Afterschool Special.[25][11] She made her feature debut co-starring with Kristy McNichol and Tatum O'Neal in Little Darlings (1980). She made her Broadway debut as Dinah Lord in a 1980 revival of The Philadelphia Story.[24] Alternating between film, TV, and stage, she did projects like the 1982 ABC movie My Body, My Child, the features Prince of the City (1981) and I Am the Cheese (1983), and the 1982 Off-Broadway productions of John Guare's Lydie Breeze.
In 1984, while a freshman at Barnard College, Nixon made theatrical history by simultaneously appearing in two hit Broadway plays directed by Mike Nichols.[18] They were The Real Thing, where she played the daughter of Jeremy Irons and Christine Baranski; and Hurlyburly, where she played a young woman who encounters sleazy Hollywood executives.[26] The two theaters were just two blocks apart and Nixon's roles were both short, so she could run from one to the other.[26] Onscreen, she played the role of Salieri's maid/spy, Lorl, in Amadeus (1984). In 1985, she appeared alongside Jeff Daniels in Lanford Wilson's Lemon Sky at Second Stage Theatre.[27]
She landed her first major supporting role in a movie as an intelligent teenager who aids her boyfriend (Christopher Collet) in building a nuclear bomb in Marshall Brickman's The Manhattan Project (1986).[28] Nixon was part of the cast of the NBC miniseries The Murder of Mary Phagan (NBC, 1988) starring Jack Lemmon and Kevin Spacey, and portrayed the daughter of a presidential candidate (Michael Murphy) in Tanner '88 (1988), Robert Altman's political satire for HBO. She reprised the role for the 2004 sequel, Tanner on Tanner.
On stage, Nixon portrayed Juliet in a 1988 New York Shakespeare Festival production of Romeo and Juliet,[29] and acted in the workshop production of Wendy Wasserstein's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Heidi Chronicles,[30] playing several characters after it came to Broadway in 1989. She was the guest star in the second episode of the long running NBC television series Law & Order. She played the role of an agoraphobic woman in a February 1993 episode of Murder, She Wrote, titled "Threshold of Fear".
Nixon succeeded Marcia Gay Harden as Harper Pitt in Tony Kushner's Angels in America (1994),[31] received a Tony nomination for her performance in Indiscretions (Les Parents Terribles) (1996), her sixth Broadway show,[32] and, although she originally lost the part to another actress, eventually took over the role of Lala Levy in the Tony-winning The Last Night of Ballyhoo (1997).
Nixon was a founding member of the Off-Broadway theatrical troupe Drama Dept.,[33] which included Sarah Jessica Parker, Dylan Baker, John Cameron Mitchell and Billy Crudup among its actors, appearing in the group's productions of Kingdom on Earth (1996), June Moon and As Bees in Honey Drown (both 1997), Hope is the Thing with Feathers (1998), and The Country Club (1999). She had supporting roles in Addams Family Values (1993), Baby's Day Out (1994), Marvin's Room (1996), and The Out-of-Towners (1999).
1998–2011: Sex and the City and other roles[edit]
She was one of the four regulars on HBO's comedy Sex and the City (1998–2004), as the lawyer Miranda Hobbes.[34] Nixon received three Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series (2002, 2003, 2004), winning the award in 2004, for the show's final season.[35]
Nixon next had her first leading role in a feature, playing a video artist who falls in love, despite her best efforts to avoid commitment, with a bisexual actor who just happens to be dating a gay man (her best friend) in Advice from a Caterpillar (2000), as well as starring opposite Scott Bakula in the holiday television movie Papa's Angels (2000). In 2002, she also acted in the indie comedy Igby Goes Down, and her turn in the theatrical production of Clare Boothe Luce's play The Women was captured for PBS' Stage on Screen series.
Post-Sex and the City, Nixon made a guest appearance on ER in 2005, as a mother who undergoes a tricky procedure to lessen the effects of a debilitating stroke. She followed up with a turn as Eleanor Roosevelt for HBO's Warm Springs (2005), which chronicled Franklin Delano Roosevelt's quest for a miracle cure for his polio. Nixon earned an Emmy nomination as Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie for her performance.[35] In December 2005, she appeared in the Fox TV series House in the episode "Deception", as a patient who suffers a seizure.
In 2006, she appeared in David Lindsay-Abaire's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Rabbit Hole in a Manhattan Theatre Club production,[36] and won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Play). In 2008, she revived her role as Miranda Hobbes in the Sex and the City feature film, directed by HBO executive producer Michael Patrick King and co-starring the cast of the original series.[37] Also in 2008, she won an Emmy for her guest appearance in an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, portraying a woman pretending to have dissociative identity disorder.[35] In 2009, Nixon won the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album along with Beau Bridges and Blair Underwood for the album An Inconvenient Truth (Al Gore).[38]
