IF you were to choose one article of clothing to represent Laura Linney, it would have to be the little black dress. Simple, elegant, appropriate for any occasion. Add a white pilgrim’s bonnet and a long apron, and Ms. Linney is transformed into the nobly suffering Elizabeth Proctor in Arthur Miller’s “Crucible.” Dress it up with pearls, a slash of red lipstick and Manolos, and she is a high-strung Upper East Side wife in the 2007 film “The Nanny Diaries.” Include a scarf, a camera bag and a crutch, and she becomes Sarah Goodwin, the recuperating war photographer in Donald Margulies’s new play “Time Stands Still,” opening on Broadway Thursday at the Manhattan Theater Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater.
Even Ms. Linney’s pale scrubbed face, with nearly invisible blond eyebrows and eyelashes, invites one to draw in expressions, as if she has paint-by-numbers features. That shape-shifting quality, along with a puritan’s work ethic, enables her to inhabit varied roles with the steadfastness of a rent-control tenant and has frequently brought rapturous reviews. Ben Brantley in The New York Times has called her “an actress of peerless emotional transparency, capable of conveying a multitude of conflicting feelings through minimal means.”
On screen she has more than held her own with megawatt actors like Jim Carrey, Liam Neeson and Sean Penn. Despite more than 30 films, 10 Broadway stints, 3 Oscar nominations and an Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning performance as Abigail Adams in HBO’s lavish 2008 mini-series “John Adams,” Ms. Linney, who turns 46 next month, has not managed to leap into the movie-star stratosphere that her talent, intelligence and looks would indicate. She remains a sort of Everywoman’s Meryl Streep.

“She’s made very smart actor’s choices, not great movie-star choices,” Mr. Margulies said. “She’s one of the best actresses of her generation, and I don’t think she’s gotten fair credit.”
The two met in 1992 when she auditioned for the supporting role of Grete, a young German journalist, in his play “Sight Unseen,” about a soul-searching celebrated artist. He remembered that first tryout. “We saw several dozen ingénues,” nearly all with bad German accents and without the necessary spark, he said. “I was beginning to think, ‘I’m going to have to cut the scene.’ ”
Ms. Linney’s turn came. “She started reading, and it was one of those fire-and-music moments,” he said. She got the part. For a Broadway production of “Sight Unseen” in 2004, he called Ms. Linney again, this time to play the larger role of the artist’s former lover.
Before a recent rehearsal of “Time Stands Still” Ms. Linney compared Mr. Margulies’s work to Brigadoon, the enchanted Scottish village that appears for a single day every 100 years. “It reveals itself over time,” she said.
That gradual process of revelation is what she loves about the theater. “Every other medium is about throwing it together and praying that it happens,” she said, her seaside-blue eyes widening and a grin breaking out across her face. “With the theater it’s a slow cooker.” When she smiles, tiny quotation marks appear like dimples on either side of her mouth, as if to emphasize her joy.
Ms. Linney, the daughter of the playwright Romulus Linney, grew up around the theater, and a bare rehearsal studio is one of her favorite places to be. “I’m profoundly lucky,” she said. “I really like it. I really like my work. I’ve liked it since I was 5 years old.”
Her parents divorced while she was an infant, but she maintained a close relationship with her father. Despite the family legacy, however, she has never felt entitled to a place onstage, saying that the label of actress has to be earned.
Perhaps that is why she has thrived on discipline and hard work since attending boarding school in upstate New York. “All the things that most kids hated, I loved,” Ms. Linney said. “I loved that things were asked of me and that, much to my surprise, I was able to do them. I loved the 10 o’clock bedtime. I loved the responsibility.”
The demands turned out to be liberating. “I was unshackled,” she said. It was invigorating after her schooling in Manhattan, where “I sort of didn’t fit in,” she added. “It just wasn’t for me. I was scared all the time.”
She went to Northwestern University but also felt out of place there, so she spent every night in the library, studying to get good enough grades to transfer. She switched to Brown, where she met other aspiring actors like Jeanne Tripplehorn. They have remained good friends.
It was during her senior year that Ms. Linney, for the first and only time, performed in a play written by her father. Unlike Hallie Foote, who has become the premier interpreter of the work of her father, Horton Foote, Ms. Linney has avoided acting in anything written by her parent.
During an interview for “Inside the Actors Studio” last year Ms. Linney recalled her decision to appear in that play, Mr. Linney’s “Childe Byron.” She played Ada, Lord Byron’s estranged daughter, who on her deathbed tries to reconcile herself with the memory of her father.
“This is the one opportunity for me to do this because I knew that if I was lucky enough to get out of school and work professionally, that I would not go after any work of my dad’s, for my sake as well as for him,” she said. “I thought while I have the opportunity, I might as well do it here.”
Her father, who was watching that interview from the front row, said the production affected him deeply. “The play is about a father and a daughter, and they have some difficulties, but their love for each other prevails,” Mr. Linney said. “So when somebody says to me now, ‘When are you and your daughter going to do a play?’ I say, ‘Well, we already have.’ ”
Ms. Linney added, “Meanwhile I was mortified because my father showed up with a camera.” (She maintains the unlikeliest of all phobias for an actress: she dislikes having her picture taken.)
After Brown she studied acting at Juilliard and soon landed a role as an understudy on Broadway, in John Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation.” An actor in the play gave her advice she said she still lives by: “Work begets work. Never say no.”
She has been in first-rate movies like “Mystic River,” “You Can Count on Me” and “The Savages” and stinkers like “Congo,” but even that clunker was not a waste. Ever the student, Ms. Linney used the six months of filming to hang out in every department, like props and sound, to learn how it was all done.
On this cold, sunny morning Ms. Linney, in jeans, a striped black-and-white sweater and no makeup, is in Midtown for a rehearsal of “Time Stands Still” with her co-stars, Brian d’Arcy James, Eric Bogosian and Alicia Silverstone. The scene opens with the aftermath of a wedding. Ms. Linney herself got married in May to Marc Schauer, a real estate agent she met five years ago in Telluride, Colo. (It is her second marriage.)
In the studio she enters through an imaginary door and limps around the room, helping Ms. Silverstone throw scattered trash into a bag. After the actors run through the section a few times, Mr. James pauses, a confused look on his face.
“Sor-r-y-y-y,” Ms. Linney sings out. “Rewind. I fed you the wrong line.”
The director, Daniel Sullivan said: “Laura is a wonderful company person. She loves the stage, and the process shows through. She takes this sort of leadership position in the company.” Mr. James described her as generous.
Maintaining that attitude is part of her survival technique, Ms. Linney said. “Fear, anxiety and neurosis: that’s just in the suitcase when you’re an actor.”
“I’ve seen the greatest actors in the world, transcendent talents, who can’t find a home,” she continued. “You have to have the disposition for it.”
Ms. Linney laughed at the suggestion that she was well adjusted. “No one is,” she countered. She intimated that doing what she loves best — acting — is what has kept her happy.
As for her career, she insisted she doesn’t obsess over her standing in Hollywood’s stock market. “That’s a quick road to cuckoo town if you think about it all the time,” she said. “The only really conscious decision I made was to cast my net wide and if the work was good, to do it.”
Ms. Linney is in three movies due out this year: “Sympathy for Delicious,” the directorial debut of her “You Can Count on Me” co-star Mark Ruffalo, scheduled to be seen at Sundance this weekend; “Morning,” starring her friend Ms. Tripplehorn and directed by Ms. Tripplehorn’s husband, Leland Orser; and “The Details,” starring Tobey Maguire. All the films have impressive names attached, but they are indie films looking for a distributor.
Very few actresses can depend on steady film work once they pass 40, but cable television has opened up new opportunities for them. Ms. Linney will star in a new series on Showtime titled “The Big C,” with Oliver Platt and Gabourey Sidibe. She will play a suburban mother who receives a diagnosis of cancer.
When Robert Greenblatt, Showtime’s president for entertainment, approached her with the idea, Ms. Linney said, “I couldn’t get it out of my head.” When she was growing up, her mother was a nurse at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
“What would you do if you knew you were going to die?” Ms. Linney asked. “Is it a curse or a privilege?”
Mr. Greenblatt is drawn to atypical programming. He said that Hollywood’s age bias means “there are so many great actresses who you just never see.”
With this new series, though, Ms. Linney will not be one of them.
Da The New York Times, 21 gennaio 2010

Figlia di un’infermiera, Ann Leggett Perse, e di uno stimato commediografo, Romulus Linney, Laura è nel cinema da più di dieci anni, i film nei quali ha recitato hanno incassato, solo sul mercato americano, quasi 500 milioni di dollari, ma rimane una scoperta che si rinnova, uno dei volti “inediti”, un nome al quale non si abbina immediatamente, ancora per poco, un viso e un talento. Qualcuno, tra i più attenti, è orgoglioso di averla notata nel 1994 nella miniserie della Pbs Tales of the City altri hanno realizzato che una brava attrice si stava affacciando nel business in Congo o in Schegge di paura, a fianco di Richard Gere e Edward Norton, dopo le apparizioni in L’olio di Lorenzo e Sotto scacco i frequentatori di Broadway, dove ha esordito nel 1990, sapevano che una interprete di valore stava crescendo negli allestimenti di Sei ,gradi di separazione, Il gabbiano, Hedda Gabler. Potere assoluto di Eastwood, The Truman Show di Peter Weir in cui è Meryl la moglie di Truman-Carrey e il bel personaggio di Sammy, giovane donna con un bambino e un fratello sbalestrato in Conta su di me di Kenneth Lonergan, con la sua scia di nomination e premi, sono i tre film che ne hanno consolidato l’identità professionale. Titoli importanti a cui sono seguiti La casa del mirto, The Mothman Prophecies e The Life of David Gaie. Uno dei suoi migliori amici, l’autore Armistead Maupin, che ha scritto la scanzonata cronaca della San Francisco dell’era pre-Aids nella serie Tv, Tales of City, sostiene che Laura Linney condivide con Grace Kelly una caratteristica seducente: «È come la neve che nasconde e copre l’attività di un vulcano. È la classica ragazza della porta accanto che potrebbe trasformarsi, in ogni momento, in una donna passionale». Dopo un anno alla Northwest University si trasferisce alla Brown per studiare teatro e da lì passa alla nota Julliard School. Il palcoscenico (ha recentemente interpretato con Liam Neeson Il crogiolo di Arthur Miller) rimane il suo territorio d’elezione. «Mi sento molto più libera a teatro che davanti alla macchina da presa. Mi sembra di respirare in modo diverso. Quando passi dal teatro al cinema, le persone ti dicono che sei troppo “grande”, fisicamente. Così fai di tutto per diventare molto piccola. Parli a voce troppo alta, gridi e - lo sanno tutti - è sbagliato. Al cinema devi imparare a lasciar “scorrere” tutto, ad abbandonarti. L’obiettivo è di non essere troppo consapevoli di se stessi e di non essere nervosi», Rimane la prima, anche dopo tante stagioni, a stupirsi sinceramente della sua evoluzione hollywoodiana. «Mi considero, a quasi quaranta anni, una studentessa: devo ancora imparare. I film erano e sono qualcosa di non atteso, qualcosa a cui non ho aspirato. Non sono cresciuta volendo diventare un’attrice cinematografica. Ovviamente non mi dispiace esserlo diventata, ma pensavo, per esempio, di entrare nella compagnia dell’Actors Theatre di Louisville o da qualche altra parte e di vivere in una fattoria».

Da Film Tv, 26 ottobre 2003