Dana Ivey

Dana Ivey is an American actress born on August 12, 1941, in Atlanta, Georgia, whose Broadway career spanned from 1968 to 2011. Her father, Hugh Daugherty Ivey, was a physicist and professor at Georgia Tech who later worked at the Atomic Energy Commission. Her mother, Mary Nell Ivey Santacroce, was a teacher, speech therapist, and actress who appeared in productions of Driving Miss Daisy, taught at Georgia State University, and was described by director John Huston as one of the three or four greatest actresses in the world. Ivey has a younger brother, John, and a half-brother, Eric Santacroce, from her mother's remarriage to Dante Santacroce. She completed her undergraduate education at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, where she was a member of Phi Mu women's fraternity, and received a Fulbright grant to study drama at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Rollins College awarded her an honorary doctorate in humane letters in February 2008.

Before settling in New York City in the late 1970s, Ivey performed in numerous American and Canadian stage productions and served as director of DramaTech in Atlanta from 1974 to 1977, a position her mother had held before her from 1949 to 1966. Her Broadway debut came in 1981, when she played two small roles in a production of Macbeth. The following year she took a major supporting role in a revival of Noël Coward's Present Laughter, earning the Clarence Derwent Award as Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play. In the 1984 season, she received two simultaneous Tony Award nominations — as Best Featured Actress in a Musical for Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George and as Best Featured Actress in a Play for a revival of Heartbreak House — a distinction shared by only three other actresses: Amanda Plummer, Jan Maxwell, and Kate Burton. Her performances in Quartermaine's Terms and in Driving Miss Daisy, in which she originated the title role, each earned her an Obie Award, as did her work in Mrs. Warren's Profession in 2005.

Ivey accumulated five Tony Award nominations across her career, the additional three coming for The Last Night of Ballyhoo in 1997, The Rivals in 2005, and Butley in 2007. In 1997 she received the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play, recognized for her work in both Sex and Longing and The Last Night of Ballyhoo. Her other Broadway credits include Pack of Lies and The Marriage of Figaro. In 2011 she appeared as Miss Prism in the Roundabout Theatre Company's Broadway production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Outside of Broadway, she performed in the New York premiere of Evan Smith's The Savannah Disputation at Playwrights Horizons in 2009, alongside Marylouise Burke, Reed Birney, and Kellie Overbey, and appeared as Winnie in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days at the Westport Playhouse in July 2010. In 2016 she played Mrs. Candour in The School for Scandal at the Lucille Lortel Theatre.

Ivey's film career began with a role in Joe Dante's 1985 science-fiction film Explorers, followed that same year by her first major screen appearance in Steven Spielberg's adaptation of The Color Purple. Subsequent film credits include Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), The Addams Family (1991), Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), Addams Family Values (1993), Two Weeks Notice (2002), Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde (2003), Rush Hour 3 (2007), and The Help (2011), in which she played Grace Higginbotham. Her television debut came in 1978 on the daytime soap opera Search for Tomorrow. She later appeared in the sitcom Easy Street opposite Loni Anderson and had guest roles on Homicide: Life on the Street, Law & Order, Frasier, Sex and the City, Boardwalk Empire, and The Big C, among other programs.