Kristen Johnston

Kristen Angela Johnston was born on September 20, 1967, in Washington, D.C., and grew up in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she graduated from Whitefish Bay High School in 1985. The daughter of former Wisconsin Republican state senator Rod Johnston, she is of English and German descent. Johnston earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in drama from New York University.

Johnston began her professional stage career with New York's Atlantic Theater Company, founded by playwright David Mamet, performing in productions that included As You Like It and Stage Door. She also worked with the Naked Angels Theater Company, appearing in The Stand-In and Hot Keys, and with New York Stage and Film in Kim's Sister alongside David Strathairn and Jane Adams. Her performance in The Lights at Lincoln Center Theater earned her a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Play in 1994. Her Broadway work spans 2001 to 2007 and includes a starring role in The Old Women as well as a participation in The 24 Hour Plays 2004.

A Carsey-Werner casting agent who saw Johnston in The Lights recommended her for the role of Sally Solomon on the NBC sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun. After a series of auditions in 1996, she was cast in the part and remained with the show from 1996 to 2001, winning the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series twice for that role.

Johnston's screen career extends across film and television. Her feature film debut came in The Debt, which won Best Short at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival, and she played Kate in Backfire! in 1995. She went on to appear in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999), The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas (2000), Music and Lyrics (2007), and Bride Wars (2009). On television, she appeared in the sixth season of HBO's Sex and the City, playing Lexi Featherston, an aging party girl who falls out of a window and dies in the episode "Splat!" In 2005, she was featured in six episodes of NBC's ER. She starred as divorce attorney Holly Franklin on the TV Land sitcom The Exes, which ran for four seasons from November 30, 2011 to September 16, 2015. In 2018, Johnston joined the CBS sitcom Mom in a recurring role as recovering addict Tammy Diffendorf, a character who is Bonnie's foster sister and joins the group's AA meetings after being released from prison; she was upgraded to series regular for the show's seventh and eighth seasons. In May 2024, Variety announced her casting in the Netflix comedy series Leanne, created by Leanne Morgan, Susan McMartin, and Chuck Lorre, in which she plays Carol, a twice-divorced woman loyal to her sister Leanne.

Johnston published her memoir, Guts: The Endless Follies and Tiny Triumphs of a Giant Disaster, through Gallery Books on March 12, 2012, and the book became a New York Times best-seller. In the memoir, she discusses an addiction to alcohol and pills that began during her high school years. In 2021, she stated she had been sober for 14 years. Through her nonprofit organization SLAM (Sobriety, Learning and Motivation), Johnston mentors high school girls from New York City dealing with addiction and self-esteem issues and has advocated for the city to establish a recovery high school. Johnston was diagnosed with lupus in November 2013, which caused her to miss filming certain episodes of The Exes; a character played by Leah Remini was introduced in the show's third season to account for her absence.