Marcia Gay Harden Biography
This attractive, dark-haired, stage-trained player of film and TV made her feature debut in “Miller’s Crossing” (1990), Joel and Ethan Coen’s stylish take on the gangster genre. Marcia Gay Harden scored with her sultry, husky-voiced portrayal of Verna whom she described as “a gun-toting, cigarette-smoking, poker-faced moll.”
One of five children born to a US Naval captain and his homemaker wife, Harden spent a peripatetic childhood, in which “I changed my identity all the time”, even pretending to be a boy for a time while living in Japan. Intending to enter diplomatic service, Harden changed her plans while attending college in Greece. After a stint at the University of Maryland, she eventually graduated from the University of Texas where she was directed by Edward Dmytryk in a film school production. After some success in regional theater in Washington, DC, Harden moved to Manhattan and joined the ranks of every other struggling actress, taking waitressing jobs and auditioning without much success. It perhaps didn’t help when a casting agent informed Harden that her “flaring-nostril look” would preclude her from ever being hired. Ignoring the rude comments, Harden enrolled in the graduate program at NYU. She went on to star in the short film “Florence” (1990), director Rebecca Miller’s portrait of an empathetic woman who develops amnesia just like her neighbor. That same year, she made her feature debut as Verna in “Miller’s Crossing”, although it took a while before her career kicked into gear.
In 1991’s “Late for Dinner”, Harden successfully portrayed a woman who ages from her twenties to her fifties and demonstrated her flair for character work that would become her hallmark. Harden offered a successful embodiment of classic Hollywood beauty Ava Gardner in the biographical miniseries “Sinatra” (CBS, 1992) and then held her own amid a bevy of Oscar-winning actresses (Shirley MacLaine, Jessica Tandy and Kathy Bates) in “Used People” (1992), as a grieving, neurotic, Hollywood-obsessed mother who reenacts celebrated performances of famous leading ladies (e.g., Audrey Hepburn, Monroe, Streisand). That same year, Harden received excellent notices for her portrayal of the erotic anti-heroine of “Crush”, an unconventional road picture from New Zealand, in which she essayed a careless American who ingratiates herself into the lives and beds of a writer and his grown daughter.
While carefully building her film career (which she has admitted in interviews was always her goal), Harden continued to hone her craft on stage. She headlined a 1992 Chicago production of “The Skin of Our Teeth” and acted alongside Paul McCrane and Frank Whaley in the Off-Broadway “The Years” in 1993. Later that year, she earned a Tony nomination for her portrait of a fragile Mormon wife who develops an addiction to Valium as her marriage crumbles in Tony Kushner’s landmark two-part epic “Angels in America”. Harden then segued to supporting Ed Harris and Beverly D’Angelo in Sam Shepard’s “Simpatico”, produced at NYC’s The Public Theatre in 1994.
Returning to the big screen, the actress earned praise as the timid wife of a local businessman who blossoms when she begins working at “The Spitfire Grill” (1996). She more than held her own opposite the manic Robin Williams in “Flubber” (1997) and managed to make the brittle daughter of a wealthy man (Anthony Hopkins) likable in “Meet Joe Black” (1998). On TV, Harden excelled as a single woman who asks her gay best friend to father her child in the soapy but entertaining “Labor of Love” (Lifetime, 1998) and then found newfound fans as Susan Silverman, the detective’s love interest in a series of Spenser movies for A&E (”Small Vices” 1999; “Thin Air” 2000; “Walking Shadow” 2001).
Harden lent intelligence and a sultriness to her turn as a NASA engineer romanced by over-the-hill astronaut Tommy Lee Jones in “Space Cowboys” (2000), but had one of her best screen roles yet as Lee Krasner in “Pollock” (also 2000), Ed Harris’ labor-of-love biopic of the tempestuous artist. Sporting a thick Brooklyn accent and forceful screen presence, Harden perfectly matches director-star Harris’ portrayal of the tortured title artist. Netting a couple of end-of-year critics’ awards, Harden was the suprise winner of that year’s Best Supporting Actress Academy Award. Not content to rest on her laurels, though, the actress remained busy appearing in TV projects such as “Guilty Hearts,” “See You In My Dreams” and, opposite Patrick Stewart as one of the devilish daughters in TNT’s Old West retelling of Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” “King of Texas” (all in 2002) as well as co-starring with Judy Davis in “Gaudi Afternoon,” and her post-Oscar choices demonstarted a decidely maverick sensibility, co-starring in Richard Dreyfuss’ short-lived series “The Education of Max Bickford” as his former student and lover turned professorial rival, and in indie writer-director John Sayles’ “Casa de los Babys” (2003), where she delivered a rich and unsentimental performance as the critical, bullying Nan, one of six American women travelling to South America to adopt babies who are forced by law to live there briefly. As the Ugly American in an otherwise sympathetic ensemble, Harden digs under the abrasive surface to suggest childhood traumas that have both hardened her character and may be visited upon her offspring if she does indeed receive a child. Harden reunited with Clint Eastwood for one of the director’s most accomplished and acclaimed films, “Mystic River” (2003), to play Celeste, the soul-lost wife of Dave (Tim Robbins), one of three childhood friends caught up in a murder that threatens to unravel their entire lives. Her harrowing performance was one of the film’s best, and earned her a second Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress.
The actress also had a well-measured role opposite Julia Roberts in “Mona Lisa Smile” (2003) as a prim instructor of deportment, grooming and table setting in the repressive 1950s environment of Wellesley College, but was less well-served by the script in the middling Ray Romano-Gene Hackman comedy “Welcome to Mooseport” (2004) as the long-suffering, overly doting aide to Hackman’s former U.S. President. A supporting turn in the admired indie “P.S.” (2004), playing the best friend of a woman (Laura Linney) who believes her new 20-year beau (Topher Grace) is an identical ringer–including his name–for the deceased boy she loved when she was 20. Simultaneously, she appeared in the Lifetime cable film “She’s Too Young” (2004) as the mother of a teen girl facing extreme high school pressures to have sex to be popular. She then winkingly played a prissy, lawsuit-happy single mother who forces the Little League to add a team to accommodate her son and other less-than-stellar young players, only to be beguiled by the bad boy charms of their boozy coach (Billy Bob Thornton) in Richard Linklater’s 2005 remake of “The Bad News Bears.”
- Also Credited As:
Marcia Gay Harden - Born:
on 08/14/1959 in La Jolla, California - Job Titles:
Actor, Dancer, Baby sitter, Caterer, Waitress
Family
- Brother: Thaddeus Harden.
- Daughter: Eulala Grace Harden Scheel. born in September 1998
- Daughter: Julitta Dee Harden Scheel. born April 22, 2004
- Father: Thaddeus Harden.
- Mother: Beverly Bushfield Harden.
- Son: Hudson Harden Scheel. born April 22, 2004
Education
- Surratsville Senior High School, Clinton, Maryland, 1976
- University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, drama, BA, 1983
- University of Maryland, Baltimore, Maryland
Milestones
- 1973 At age 13, posed as a boy for a period in Japan
- 1983 Completed her BA at the University of Texas
- 1987 Appeared in “In the Lion’s Den”, an unsold pilot presented on “CBS Summer Playhouse”
- 1990 Feature film acting debut as Verna in the Coen brothers’ “Miller’s Crossing”
- 1990 Had title role in Rebecca Miller’s short “Florence”, playing an empathetic woman who develops amnesia
- 1992 Delivered a strong turn as a pop culture freak who dresses up as various actresses in “Used People”
- 1992 Played Sabina in a Chicago stage production of “The Skin of Our Teeth”
- 1992 Portrayed screen siren Ava Gardner in the CBS miniseries biography “Sinatra”
- 1992 Starred in “Crush”, director Alison Maclean’s portrait of a reckless American woman who has relatioships with a famous novelist and his daughter
- 1993 Acted in the Off-Broadway play “The Years” alongside Frank Whaley and Paul McCrane
- 1993 Appeared on Broadway as Harper Pitt in Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches”; received Tony nomination; later reprised role in the epic’s second half “Angels in America: Perestroika”
- 1994 Starred opposite Ed Harris and Beverly D’Angelo in “Simpatico”, Sam Shepard’s play produced at the Public Theatre in NYC
- 1995 Delivered a monologue about the death of her character’s mother in “Talking With” (PBS), directed by Kathy Bates
- 1996 Offered fine supporting turn as an abused wife in “The Spitfire Grill”
- 1997 Co-starred opposite Robin Williams in “Flubber”
- 1997 Had featured role as an FBI agent in the HBO docudrama “Path to Paradise: The Untold Story of the World Trade Center Bombing”
- 1998 Appeared as one of Anthony Hopkins’ daughters in “Meet Joe Black”
- 1998 Portrayed a single woman who decides to have a child with her gay best friend until she meets a man she thinks may be Mr. Right in “Labor of Love” (Lifetime)
- 1998 Starred in pilot for CBS sitcom “By Anne Nivel”
- 1999 Played Susan Silverman, the girlfriend of private eye Spenser (played by Joe Mantegna) in “Small Vices” (A&E)
- 2000 Delivered a scene-stealing turn as artist Lee Krasner in the biopic “Pollock”, directed by and starring Ed Harris
- 2000 Had featured role as a NASA engineer romanced by astronaut Tommy Lee Jones in “Space Cowboys”
- 2000 Reprised Susan Silverman in the sequel “Thin Air: A Spenser Mystery” (A&E)
- 2001 Co-starred with Richard Dreyfuss in “The Education of Max Bickford” (CBS)
- 2001 Acted in the New York Shakespeare Festival summer production of “The Seagull”, staged in Central Park by Mike Nichols
- 2001 Again reprised Susan Silverman in A&E’s “Walking Shadow”
- 2001 Co-starred as a woman who asks a writer friend (Judy Davis) to help her locate her missing husband in “Gaudi Afternoon”
- 2002 Had featured role opposite Patrick Stewart in “Boss Lear” (TNT)
- 2002 Starred in the based-on-fact CBS miniseries “Guilty Hearts” (filmed 1999), about a woman who realizes the man with whom she was having an affair is guilty of murder
- 2003 Appeared in “Mona Lisa Smile”
- 2003 Played the wife to Tim Robbins in “Mystic River,” directed by Clint Eastwood; received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role
- 2004 Cast opposite Laura Linney and Topher Grace in “P.S.”
- 2004 Played Gene Hackman’s former girlfriend in the comedy “Welcome to Mooseport”
- 2005 Cast opposite Billy Bob Thornton in the remake of the “Bad News Bears”
- 2006 Played a Laura Bush-esque first lady opposite Dennis Quaid in Paul Weitz’s political satire “American Dreamz”
- Began acting on the Munich stage performing in plays by Edward Albee and Chekhov
- Began college in Athens, Greece
- Cast in Lasse Hallstrom’s “Hoax” opposite Richard Gere (lensed 2005)
- Continued her studies in Munich, Germany
- Developed an interest in theater while living in Greece by attending plays at the Herodus Atticus, an old theater near the base of the Parthenon (date approximate)
- Moved several times throughout her school years as the daughter of a Navy captain
- Moved to Washington, DC; began acting in regional theater and local TV
Next:Samantha Mathis Biography
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