Marcia Gay Harden

Marcia Gay Harden is an American actress born on August 14, 1959. She is best known for her critically acclaimed performances in film, television, and theater. Harden achieved her breakthrough role in the Coen brothers' 1990 mobster drama Miller's Crossing. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for portraying painter Lee Krasner in Pollock (2000) and earned a second nomination in the same category for Mystic River (2003). She is also a Tony Award winner for her stage work on Broadway.

Harden was born in the La Jolla area of San Diego, California, to Beverly Harden, a housewife, and Thad Harold Harden, a United States Navy Captain and fighter pilot. She grew up with three sisters and one brother. Due to her father's military career, her family moved frequently, living in Japan, Germany, Greece, California, and Maryland. She graduated from Surrattsville High School in Clinton, Maryland, in 1976. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in theater from the University of Texas at Austin in 1980 and a Master of Fine Arts from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 1988.

Harden made her initial film appearance in a 1979 student production at the University of Texas. During the 1980s, she appeared in television shows such as Simon & Simon, Kojak, and CBS Summer Playhouse, as well as her first feature film role in The Imagemaker (1986). Following her breakthrough in Miller's Crossing, she portrayed Ava Gardner in the 1992 miniseries Sinatra. Harden made her Broadway debut in 1993 starring in Tony Kushner's play Angels in America, which earned her a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play.

Throughout her career, Harden has appeared in numerous high-profile films. Her credits include The First Wives Club (1996), Flubber (1997), Meet Joe Black (1998), Labor of Love (1998), Space Cowboys (2000), Mona Lisa Smile (2003), Into the Wild (2007), The Mist (2007), Rails & Ties (2007), Home (2008), Whip It (2009), and the Fifty Shades film series (2015–2018). In 2009, she returned to Broadway in Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage, winning the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.

On television, Harden received Primetime Emmy Award nominations for her guest roles in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and The Morning Show, as well as her supporting role in the television film The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler (2009). Her television career includes roles in Damages, The Newsroom, and How to Get Away with Murder, along with starring main roles in Code Black and So Help Me Todd.

Harden married prop master Thaddaeus Scheel in 1996, with whom she has three children, before filing for divorce in February 2012. Outside of acting, she is an avid potter and a practitioner of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement. In May 2018, she published her memoir, The Seasons of My Mother: A Memoir of Love, Family, and Flowers, detailing her family relationship and her mother's struggle with Alzheimer's disease.