Blair Brown

Blair Brown, born Bonnie Blair Brown on April 23, 1946, in Washington, D.C., is an American actress whose career spans theater, film, and television. Her father worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, and her mother was a teacher. Brown attended The Madeira School in McLean, Virginia, before training at the National Theatre School of Canada, where she graduated in 1969. She subsequently gained experience as a performer at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival before establishing herself across multiple entertainment mediums.

Brown's screen career began with a role in the 1973 Oscar-winning film The Paper Chase, followed by her first major starring credit in The Choirboys in 1977. Her film work through the late 1970s and 1980s included Altered States opposite William Hurt, One Trick Pony with Paul Simon, A Flash of Green (1984), and Stealing Home opposite Mark Harmon. Her role as the romantic lead opposite John Belushi in Continental Divide (1981) earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Motion Picture Actress in a Comedy/Musical. Additional film credits include Strapless (1989), The Astronaut's Wife (1999), Clint Eastwood's Space Cowboys (2000), Lars von Trier's Dogville, the Kevin Bacon-directed Loverboy (2005), and The Sentinel (2006).

On television, Brown appeared in numerous movies and miniseries during the 1980s. Her portrayal of Jacqueline Kennedy in the 1983 miniseries Kennedy brought her a second Golden Globe nomination, for Best Actress in a Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television, along with a BAFTA nomination. She also appeared in the 1996 miniseries A Season in Purgatory and played Anna Roosevelt in a telefilm centered on Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Her profile rose considerably during her five-season run from 1987 to 1991 on the comedy-drama series The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, in which she played the title character. The show aired on NBC for two seasons before moving to the Lifetime cable channel, and Brown received five consecutive Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series across its run. She also appeared in prime-time series including The Rockford Files, Kojak, Frasier, ER, Smallville, Touched by an Angel, and Ed. Beginning in 2008, she starred as Nina Sharp in the Fox series Fringe, and she later appeared in multiple seasons of the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black as Judy King, a fictional television personality and inmate loosely based on Martha Stewart.

Brown's stage career began early and remained central to her professional life. She appeared in the 1975 New York Shakespeare Festival production of The Comedy of Errors and took on the role of Lucy Brown in the 1976 production of The Threepenny Opera, produced by Joe Papp and directed by Richard Foreman. Her first major Broadway appearance came in 1989 with The Secret Rapture, written by David Hare. Following the conclusion of Molly Dodd, Brown became a frequent Broadway presence. She appeared in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia at Lincoln Center Theater in 1995 and played Frau Schneider in two separate runs of the Cabaret revival, in 1998 and 2003. In the play Copenhagen, she portrayed Margrethe, the wife of physicist Niels Bohr, a performance that earned her the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play in 2000. She also played the lead role in Sarah Ruhl's The Clean House at Lincoln Center in 2006, and appeared in James Joyce's The Dead, among other productions. Her Broadway career extended from 1976 through 2022.

Beyond performing, Brown directed two Off-Broadway productions: Lovely Day at the Beckett Theater in 2006 and A Feminine Ending at Playwrights Horizons in 2007. She also built a substantial body of voiceover work beginning in the 1990s, narrating audiobooks including John Grisham's The Client, Stephen King's Rose Madder, Lois Lowry's Number the Stars, and Isabel Allende's Inés of My Soul, as well as documentaries for PBS's American Experience series, The Secret Life of the Brain, and a 2006 PBS documentary about Marie Antoinette. In April 2010, she co-narrated the PBS special The Buddha alongside Richard Gere.

In her personal life, Brown met actor Richard Jordan while filming the miniseries Captains and the Kings in 1976. The two lived together from 1976 to 1985, and their son, Robert Hand Jordan, was born in 1983. She subsequently had a relationship with playwright David Hare from 1985 to 1990, during which he referred to her as his muse.