Victoria Clark

Victoria Clark, born October 10, 1959, in Dallas, Texas, is an American actress, musical theatre soprano, and director whose Broadway career has spanned from 1983 to 2025. The daughter of Lorraine and Banks Clark, she grew up in Dallas and attended the Hockaday School, an all-girls institution in that city. She studied piano and later enrolled at the Interlochen Arts Academy before pursuing her undergraduate education at Yale University, where she graduated in 1982. During her time at Yale, she sang the role of Mabel in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance at the age of eighteen, performed the title role in Patience, and directed a production of Ruddigore for the Yale Gilbert & Sullivan Society. Following graduation, she studied stage direction at New York University's Musical Theatre Master's Program at Tisch and went on to direct operas and musicals professionally, though her career has primarily centered on performing.

Clark's early Broadway work included understudying in the original production of Sunday in the Park with George, a role she never performed onstage. She subsequently took on a series of credited Broadway roles: Guys and Dolls from 1992 to 1993, A Grand Night for Singing from 1993 to 1994, and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying from 1995 to 1996, in which she played Smitty. She created the role of Alice Beane in Titanic, appearing in that production from 1997 to 1999, and played Fraulein Kost in Cabaret from 1999 to 2000. In 2003 she took on the role of Penelope Pennywise in Urinetown. Outside of Broadway during this period, she played Doris MacAfee in the City Center Encores! production of Bye Bye Birdie in 2004.

Clark's career reached a defining milestone in 2005 when she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her performance in The Light in the Piazza, a production that ran on Broadway from 2005 to 2006. The same role earned her the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Musical, the Outer Critics Circle Award, and the Joseph Jefferson Award. In 2007, she appeared as former showgirl Sally Durant Plummer in the Encores! staged concert presentation of Follies at City Center. The following year, she created the role of Margaret Brennan in The Marriage of Bette and Boo Off-Broadway for the Roundabout Theatre Company, and appeared in Prayer for My Enemy, a Craig Lucas play at Playwrights Horizons that co-starred Michele Pawk and Jonathan Groff and was directed by Bartlett Sher. Also in 2008, she released her first solo album, Fifteen Seconds of Grace, produced by PS Classics, and received the Distinguished Artist Award from the New York Singing Teachers' Association in 2006.

Clark portrayed the Mother Superior in the Broadway production of Sister Act, which opened on April 20, 2011, earning her a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. She subsequently played Sally in the Kennedy Center and Broadway production of Follies, which ran at the Center Theatre Group/Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles from May 3 through June 9, 2012. In 2013, she starred in the Manhattan Theatre Club's production of The Snow Geese by Sharr White alongside Mary-Louise Parker and Danny Burstein, and appeared as Marie/the Fairy Godmother in the Broadway production of Cinderella, a role for which she received her second Tony nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. She returned to Cinderella for a run lasting from January to September 2014. In December 2014, she appeared as Carrie Mathison's mother in the Season 4 finale of Showtime's Homeland. Clark played Mamita in the Broadway revival of Gigi, which opened in April 2015, earning yet another Tony nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical.

In 2017, Clark appeared in the title role of Sousatzka in Toronto, a production intended as a pre-Broadway tryout. In 2022, she recorded Maury Yeston's December Songs, featuring orchestration by Larry Hochman. That same year, following encouragement from composer and longtime friend Jeanine Tesori, Clark originated the title role of Kimberly Akimbo in its Off-Broadway run at the Linda Gross Theatre, produced by the Atlantic Theater Company, earning Lucille Lortel and Outer Critics Circle Awards for the performance. When the musical transferred to Broadway in 2022, Clark's performance brought her a second Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical in 2023, making her a two-time winner in that category and a five-time Tony nominee overall. In 2025, she joined the cast of the television series The Gilded Age as Joan Carlton.

Beyond the stage, Clark's voice appears on numerous Broadway cast albums and in several animated films. She teaches voice at the Michael Howard Studios and studies acting there as well, while also studying voice with Edward Sayegh. On August 1, 2015, she married Thomas Reidy in North Carolina. She has a son, T.L., from a previous marriage.