Frances Conroy

Frances Hardman Conroy was born on March 15, 1953, in Monroe, Georgia, the daughter of Ossie Ray Conroy and Vincent P. Conroy. She trained at the Juilliard School as part of the Drama Division's Group 6 from 1973 to 1977, a cohort that included Kevin Conroy, Kelsey Grammer, Harriet Sansom Harris, and Robin Williams. Throughout the 1970s, Conroy worked regularly with regional and touring theatrical companies, most notably The Acting Company, and played Desdemona opposite Richard Dreyfuss and Raul Julia in a production of Othello at the Delacorte Theatre. One of her earliest film appearances came in Woody Allen's 1979 film Manhattan, in which she played a Shakespearean actress.

Conroy made her Broadway debut in 1980 in Edward Albee's The Lady from Dubuque, a production that was well received. Over the following two decades she maintained an active stage career, appearing on Broadway in productions including The Choir Rehearsal, In the Summer House, and Broken Glass, among others. She received one Tony nomination and four Drama Desk Award nominations during this period, winning the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play in 1990. Her Broadway work also encompassed productions of Our Town, The Little Foxes, and The Ride Down Mt. Morgan. In the summer of 1998 she returned to the Delacorte Theatre to play Mrs. Antrobus in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth.

Alongside her stage work, Conroy built a film career beginning in the 1980s. She appeared in Falling in Love in 1984 in a small role as a waitress, and in 1988 played the elder daughter of Burt Lancaster's patriarch in Rocket Gibraltar. That same year she had supporting roles in both Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Woody Allen's Another Woman. In 1992 she portrayed political science teacher Christine Downes in Scent of a Woman. She married Jonathan Furst in 1980; the couple divorced in the late 1980s, and Conroy subsequently married actor Jan Munroe in 1992.

Conroy became widely known to television audiences through her role as Ruth Fisher, the family matriarch in HBO's drama series Six Feet Under, which ran from 2001 to 2005 across 63 episodes. For that performance she won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Television Series Drama in 2004, the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series in 2004, and two additional Screen Actors Guild Awards as part of the ensemble cast in 2003 and 2004. She also received four Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series for the role.

Following Six Feet Under, Conroy took on a range of television roles, including a guest appearance on Desperate Housewives in 2008 as Virginia Hildebrand and a recurring role on How I Met Your Mother as Loretta Stinson, Barney Stinson's mother. In 2010 she voiced Angie Dinkley in the animated series Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated and played Madylyn in the thriller Stone opposite Robert De Niro, as well as the recurring character Peggy Haplin on the ABC drama series Happy Town.

In 2011, Conroy joined the FX anthology series American Horror Story, playing the older version of Moira O'Hara in its first season, earning a Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress on Television nomination and a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie. She returned for subsequent seasons in distinct roles: as Shachath, the Angel of Death, in Asylum; as Myrtle Snow, a member of the Witches Council, in Coven, for which she received a second Emmy nomination in the same category; as Gloria Mott in Freak Show; as an actress in the re-enactment segments of Roanoke; as Bebe Babbitt in Cult; as Belle Noir in Double Feature; and reprising both Myrtle Snow and Moira O'Hara in Apocalypse. Her appearances across seven seasons of the show place her, alongside Denis O'Hare, fourth among the actors who have appeared in the most seasons of the series. Beginning in 2015, Conroy also starred as Dawn in the first season of the Hulu series Casual, which received a Golden Globe nomination for its debut season.

On film, Conroy co-starred in the 2019 origin film Joker as the mother of the titular character, and in 2021 appeared as Mrs. Burbank in The Power of the Dog, a role for which she received a Satellite Award as part of the cast and a Critics' Choice Award nomination. In 2023 she voiced The Director in the animated feature film Nimona. A car accident at some point in her life damaged her right eye; surgery to repair the cornea resulted in a change in the eye's color.