Marcia Gay Harden (born August 14, 1959) is an American actress. She has appeared in films, television, and the theatre. Harden is a winner of the Tony Award and the Academy Award.
Early life
Harden, one of five children, was born in La Jolla, San Diego, California, the daughter of Beverly (née Bushfield), a housewife, and Thaddeus Harold Harden, a Texas native who was an officer in the United States Navy.1 One of her siblings is named Thaddeus; her spouse is named Thaddaeus. Harden's family frequently moved because of her father's job, living in Japan, Germany, Greece, California and Maryland.2 She graduated from Surrattsville High School in Clinton, Maryland in 1977, the University of Texas at Austin with a BA in theatre, and the graduate theatre program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts with a Master of Fine Arts.
Career
Harden's first film role was in a 1979 student-produced movie at the University of Texas at Austin. Throughout the 1980s, she appeared in several television programs, including Simon and Simon, Kojak, and CBS Summer Playhouse. She appeared in the Coen Brothers' Miller's Crossing (1990), a 1930s mobster drama in which she first gained wide exposure. In 1992, she played actress Ava Gardner alongside Philip Casnoff as Frank Sinatra in the made for TV miniseries Sinatra. Throughout the 1990s, she continued to appear in films and television. Notable film roles include The Imagemaker (1986), her first screen role, in which she played a stage manager; the Disney sci-fi comedy Flubber (1997), a popular hit in which she co-starred with Robin Williams; the supernatural drama Meet Joe Black (1998); Labor of Love (1998), a Lifetime Television movie in which she starred with David Marshall Grant; and Space Cowboys (2000), an all-star adventure-drama of aging astronauts.
In 1993, Harden debuted on Broadway in the role of Harper Pitt (and others) in Tony Kushner's Angels in America. The role earned her critical acclaim and she received a Tony Award nomination (Best Featured Actress in a Play). The winner in that category was Debra Monk in Redwood Curtain.
Harden was awarded the 2000 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of painter Lee Krasner in Pollock (2000). In 2003, she was again nominated in the same category for Mystic River.
Harden guest-starred as FBI undercover agent Dana Lewis posing as a white-supremacist in "Raw", an episode of the popular crime drama Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. In 2007, this role earned Harden her first Emmy Award nomination for best guest actress in a drama series. She reprised the role in the series' eighth season premiere.
In 2007, Harden appeared in several films, including Sean Penn's critically acclaimed Into the Wild, and Frank Darabont's The Mist, based on the novella by Stephen King.
In 2008, she appeared in Home, of which her co-stars include her daughter, Eulala Scheel, and the comedy The Lonely Maiden with Christopher Walken and Morgan Freeman. Harden starred in the Christmas Cottage (2008), a story of the early artistic beginnings of the Painter of Light, Thomas Kinkade. In 2009, she appeared as a regular on the critically-acclaimed FX series Damages as a shrewd corporate attorney, opposite Glenn Close and William Hurt. Harden received a 2009 Emmy Award nomination for her role in The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler, a TV film also starring Oscar winner Anna Paquin. She was a Best Supporting Actress in a TV Movie/Miniseries nominee, and lost to Shohreh Aghdashloo. If she had won this Emmy, Marcia Gay Harden would have entered the elite group of 'triple-crown' actors; actors who have won the three acting awards of the highest honor: the Academy Award (film), the Tony Award (stage) and the Emmy Award (television). She is yet to win an Emmy.
In 2009, Harden returned to Broadway in Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage. She starred with James Gandolfini, Hope Davis and Jeff Daniels. Each lead actor was nominated for the Tony Award and on June 8, Harden won Best Actress in a Play.3
Personal life
Harden is married to Thaddaeus Scheel, with whom she worked on The Spitfire Grill (1996), and the couple have three children: a daughter, Eulala Grace Scheel, and twins Julitta Dee Scheel and Hudson Harden Scheel. The family lives in Harlem, New York. On December 15, 2003, her young nephew Sander Waring Harden and niece Audrey Gay Harden died as a result of a tragic fire in their Queens, New York, apartment, owned by her former sister-in-law Rebecca Harden who later died from injuries received in the fire. Rebecca Harden was divorced from the children's father, Thaddeus Harden, who is Marcia Gay Harden's brother.citation needed
Filmography
References
External links
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![video Marcia Gay Harden dishes her Tony Awards nomination for "God of Carnage" plus past Oscars win for "Pollock" with Gold Derby ... Picture](../viewVideo.html?title=Marcia Gay Harden on Tonys, Oscar and God of CarnageYouTube=YouTube&summary=Marcia Gay Harden dishes her Tony Awards nomination for "God of Carnage" plus past Oscars win for "Pollock" with Gold Derby ...&link=http://www.youtube.com/v/-vIAwPJOz2M&fs=1&source=uds&autoplay=1&thumb=http://3.gvt0.com/vi/-vIAwPJOz2M/default.jpg&celebrity=Marcia Gay Harden&videoType=YouTube)
