Mary-Louise Parker

Mary-Louise Parker is an American actress born on August 2, 1964, in Columbia, South Carolina, the youngest of four children born to Caroline Louise (née Morell) and John Morgan Parker, a judge who served in the U.S. Army. Because of her father's military career, Parker spent portions of her childhood in South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, as well as in Thailand, Germany, and France. She graduated from Marcos de Niza High School in Tempe, Arizona, and went on to major in drama at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, completing her degree in 1986. Her early professional work included a role on the soap opera Ryan's Hope before she relocated to New York City in the late 1980s.

Parker made her Broadway debut in 1990 playing Rita in Craig Lucas's Prelude to a Kiss, a production she had followed from its off-Broadway origins. The performance earned her the Clarence Derwent Award and a Tony Award nomination. Her film career gained momentum in the early 1990s with roles in Grand Canyon (1991) alongside Kevin Kline, Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) with Kathy Bates, Mary Stuart Masterson, and Jessica Tandy, The Client (1994) with Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones, Bullets Over Broadway (1994) with John Cusack, and Boys on the Side (1995) with Drew Barrymore and Whoopi Goldberg. She also appeared in a film adaptation of another Craig Lucas play, Reckless (1995), alongside Mia Farrow, followed by Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady (1996), which starred Nicole Kidman, Viggo Mortensen, Christian Bale, John Malkovich, and Barbara Hershey. In 1997, she appeared alongside Matthew Modine in Tim Hunter's The Maker.

Parker's stage work continued off-Broadway in 1997 when she originated the role of Li'l Bit in Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive, opposite David Morse. The performance earned her the 1997 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Actress and the 1997 Obie Award for Performance. She also appeared in several independent films during the late 1990s, including Let the Devil Wear Black, The Five Senses, and The Simple Life of Noah Dearborn (1999) with Sidney Poitier.

From 2000 to 2001, Parker starred in David Auburn's Proof in both off-Broadway and Broadway productions, portraying Catherine Llewellyn. Her Broadway performance brought her the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play in 2001 as well as the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play that same year. In 2003, she played Harper Pitt, the Valium-addicted Mormon wife of a closeted lawyer, in HBO's television adaptation of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, directed by Mike Nichols. The role earned her both a Golden Globe Award and a Primetime Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or Television Film.

In 2004, Parker returned to Broadway in a Craig Lucas production of Reckless, directed by Mark Brokaw, which earned her an additional Tony Award nomination for Best Actress in a Play in 2005. That same year, she began starring as Nancy Botwin in the Showtime series Weeds, which ran from 2005 to 2012. She received the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Television Series Musical or Comedy in 2006 for that role, along with three Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series between 2007 and 2009. Between 2001 and 2006, she also recurred as Amy Gardner on the NBC series The West Wing, a role for which she received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series in 2002.

Parker's additional film work during this period included The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), in which she portrayed Zerelda Mimms alongside Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Rockwell, and Garret Dillahunt, as well as The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008). She took the lead role in the Roundabout Theatre Broadway revival of Hedda Gabler, which ran from January through March 29, 2009. In 2010, she starred opposite Bruce Willis in Red, an adaptation of the comic book miniseries, and reprised that role in Red 2 (2013). She also appeared in R.I.P.D. in 2013.

Parker appeared in the Manhattan Theatre Club's Broadway production of Sharr White's The Snow Geese at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre from October 24 through December 15, 2013, in a production directed by Daniel J. Sullivan that also starred Danny Burstein and Victoria Clark. Off-Broadway, she starred in Simon Stephens's Heisenberg, produced by the Manhattan Theatre Club and directed by Mark Brokaw, which opened on June 2, 2015, and later transferred to Broadway. Parker published her memoir, Dear Mr. You, in 2015, and in 2017 she starred as Roma Guy in the ABC television miniseries When We Rise. Since 2007, she has contributed articles to Esquire magazine.

Parker returned to Broadway in 2019 to star in The Sound Inside, winning her second Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play in 2020. In 2022, she reprised the role of Li'l Bit in a Broadway production of How I Learned to Drive, the role she had originated off-Broadway twenty-five years earlier, earning her fifth Tony Award nomination. Her Broadway career, which spans from 1990 to 2022, also includes productions of Bus Stop and The Snow Geese, among others. Parker was originally from Fort Jackson, South Carolina.