Laura Linney

Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission. When Laura Linney starred in a 2002 Broadway revival of The Crucible , her favorite part was Act Three, when her character, Elizabeth Proctor, doesn’t appear onstage. “I would be underneath the floorboards of the theater, just listening,” she says. “You could hear the orchestration of the voices. Liam Neeson tromping around. Then you realize just what a fucking genius Arthur Miller was. When you’re in the work like that, it just envelops you and moves through your body.” Laura Linney is an actor’s actor. Juilliard-trained and now sitting on the school’s board of trustees, she has built a more-than-30-year career moving across television, film, and theater. Most recently, she appeared in the final season of the crime drama Ozark before flying to Dublin to shoot The Miracle Club with Maggie Smith and Kathy Bates. Throughout her body of work, she exudes a quality at once familiar and slightly hard to place, with a dimpled smile that can slide easily from delight to menace and a contralto voice that can be adjusted to the scale of the medium. She has a good disposition for the job, with an eye for longevity and a sunny steeliness that can weather caprice and ego. Still, when it comes to why she became an actor, she has no answer. “I don’t know if I really want to know,” she says one day at a restaurant in Brooklyn. “Maybe when I’m 80 I’ll look at it.” Very The Squid and the Whale.This 2005 semi-autobiographical film by Noah Baumbach tells the story of the divorce of two parents, played by Jeff Daniels and Linney. Daniels’s character moves to the other side of Prospect Park after they tell their sons that they’re separating. Well, actually, my father and Noah Baumbach’s father knew each other and were at the same writer’s colony together so it is all … Yeah. It was a very nasty divorce. I used to tag along with my father to rehearsals. I remember sitting on the floor at HB Studios, watching Herbert Berghof direct some actors in some scene. My perspective level was low because I was on the floor. How old were you? Young. Six, maybe. I remember hearing him type outside the door. Torrents. My father was a brilliantly complicated guy. He had tremendous passion and ability to express it. I can remember sitting outside the door listening to the rhythm of the typing. It was electric typewriters then. So it was like r-r-r-rr-r-r-r-rraww . There’d be a silence. And I didn’t know what was more exciting — the silence or the typing. I was like, Oh, he’s thinking. Oh God, there’s thinking, there’s something … Then you can feel the dam break and he would type-type-type-type-type. What was the first role that you had? I think this is correct, but in third grade — whenever 1972 was, after Ms. Magazine first came out — we did a Christmas play called Mrs. Claus Takes Over . Santa Claus got a cold, couldn’t deliver the presents. Mrs. Claus came to the rescue, and I was Mrs. Claus. I remember doing satires of beauty pageants. There was something that, even then, rubbed me the wrong way about all of that. I just thought it was terribly chauvinistic. That shouldn’t be the only way someone can get a scholarship to college. During your senior year at Brown, you performed Childe Byron,A 1977 play that imagines Ada Lovelace contending with her relationship with her father, the poet Lord Byron, who went into exile after her birth. When Romulus read Byron’s poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” about the separation, he said , “These lines just laid me out.” one of your father’s plays. How did that come about? Is this article only going to be about me and my father? Why? Well, you just want to pave your own way. I have no issue with other people doing the work of their own parents. I wasn’t comfortable doing that to myself or doing that to him, for that matter. God forbid it didn’t go well, that would have been awful for both of us. Did you feel like there were specific difficulties of how