Cynthia Nixon

Cynthia Nixon

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Cynthia Nixon

Cynthia Ellen Nixon (born April 9, 1966) is a Tony and two-time Emmy Award-winning American actress who is known for her portrayal of lawyer Miranda Hobbes in the popular HBO comedy-drama, and movie Sex and the City (1998-2004, 2008).

Biography

Early life and career
1990s
Stardom
Personal life

Filmography
Further reading
References
External links

Biography

Early life and career

Nixon was born in New York City, New York, the daughter of Anne Knoll, an actress, and Walter Nixon, a radio journalist.^[1]^[2] Her first onscreen appearance was as an imposter on To Tell the Truth, where her mother worked. She began acting at age 12 as the object of a wealthy schoolmate's crush in The Seven Wishes of a Rich Kid, a 1979 ABC Afterschool Special. She made her feature debut co-starring with Kristy McNichol and Tatum O'Neal in Little Darlings (1980). She made her Broadway debut as the bratty Dinah Lord in a 1980 revival of The Philadelphia Story. Alternating between film, TV and stage she did projects like the 1982 ABC-movie My Body, My Child, the features Prince of the City (1981) and I Am the Cheese (1983) and the 1982 off-Broadway productions of John Guare's Lydie Breeze. In 1985 she appeared alongside Jeff Daniels in Lanford Wilson's Lemon Sky at Second Stage Theatre.

Nixon graduated from Hunter College High School,^[3] and made theatrical history while a freshman at Barnard College in 1984, simultaneously appearing in two hit Broadway plays directed by Mike Nichols.^[4] These were The Real Thing, where Nixon played the daughter of Jeremy Irons and Christine Baranski; and Hurlyburly, where she played a young woman who encounters sleazy Hollywood types. The two theaters were just two blocks apart and Nixon's roles were both short, so she could run from one to the other. That year's Oscar-winning Best Picture Amadeus, directed by Milos Forman, also featured her in a brief role as Mozart's young servant-girl.

She landed her first major supporting part in a movie as an intelligent teenager who aids her boyfriend (Christopher Collet) in building a nuclear bomb in Marshall Brickman's The Manhattan Project (1986).^[5] Nixon was part of the cast of the NBC miniseries The Murder of Mary Phagan (NBC, 1988) starring Jack Lemmon and Kevin Spacey and portrayed the daughter of a presidential candidate (Michael Murphy) in Tanner '88 (also 1988), Robert Altman's sharply-observed, episodic political satire for HBO--she would later reprise the role for the 2004 follow-up *Tanner on Tanner.

1990s

On stage, Nixon portrayed Juliet in a 1988 New York Shakespeare Festival production of Romeo and Juliet and acted in the workshop production of Wendy Wasserstein's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Heidi Chronicles, playing several characters after it came to Broadway in 1989. She replaced Marcia Gay Harden as a pill-popping Mormon wife whose husband reveals his homosexuality in Tony Kushner's landmark two-part Angels in America (1994), received a Tony nomination for her performance as the headstrong young woman who falls for a mama's boy in Indiscretions (Les Parents Terribles) (1996, her sixth Broadway show) and, though she originally lost the part to another actress, eventually took over the role of Lala Levy, the aspiring Scarlett O'Hara in the Tony Award-winning The Last Night of Ballyhoo (1997).

Nixon was a founding member of the theatrical troupe The Drama Dept., which included Sarah Jessica Parker, Dylan Baker, John Cameron Mitchell and Billy Crudup among its actors, appearing in the group's productions of Kingdom on Earth (1996), June Moon and As Bees in Honey Drown (both 1997), Hope is the Thing with Feathers (1998), and The Country Club (1999).

Nixon has contributed supporting performances to Addams Family Values (1993), Marvin's Room (1996) The Out-of-Towners (1999) and Baby's Day Out

Stardom

She raised her profile significantly as one of the four regulars of HBO's successful comedy Sex and the City (1998-2004), as the no-nonsense lawyer Miranda in support of series star Sarah Jessica Parker. After Emmy nominations as Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 2002 and 2003, Nixon took home the trophy in 2004 for the series' final season.

The immense popularity of the series led Nixon to enjoy her first leading role in a feature, playing a video artist who falls in love, despite her best efforts to avoid commitment, with a bisexual actor who just happens to be dating a gay man (her best friend) in Advice From a Caterpillar (2000), as well as starring opposite Scott Bakula in the holiday telepic Papa's Angels (2000). In 2002 she also landed a stint as Mrs. Piggee in the indie comedy Igby Goes Down, and her turn in the theatrical production of Clare Booth Luce's play The Women was captured for PBS's Stage On Screen series.

Post-Sex, Nixon did a guest stint on ER in 2005 as a mother who undergoes a tricky procedure to lessen the effects of a debilitating stroke. She followed up with a turn as Eleanor Roosevelt for HBO's Warm Springs (2005), which chronicled Franklin Delano Roosevelt's quest for a miracle cure for his paralytic illness. Nixon earned an Emmy nomination as Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie for her performance. She then had a 2005 stint on the Fox hit series House episode Deception, which aired on December 13, 2005 as a patient who suffers a seizure and matches wits with Dr. House (Hugh Laurie).

In 2006, Nixon won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Play) for David Lindsay-Abaire's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Rabbit Hole. In 2008, she revived her role as Miranda Hobbes in Sex and the City feature film, directed by HBO executive producer Michael Patrick King and co-starring the cast of the original series.^[6]

Personal life

Nixon at the Garden State Equality gala dinner in March 2008

Nixon has two children, daughter Samantha (b. 1996) and son Charles Ezekiel (b. 2002),^[7] with Danny Mozes, an English professor, with whom she was in a relationship from 1988 to 2003.^[8]^[9]

Nixon began dating education activist Christine Marinoni in January 2004;^[10] media reports of the relationship started surfacing in September of the same year.^[11] In February 2005, the New York Post and other sources reported that Nixon had moved to Brooklyn to live with Marinoni. However, Nixon told the The New York Times in January 2006 that she had not moved and that keeping her kids in their Manhattan public schools took priority. Discussing her relationship in an interview in New York Magazine in 2006, Nixon stated that she never felt any struggle with her sexuality: "I never felt like there was an unconscious part of me around that woke up or that came out of the closet; there wasn't a struggle, there wasn't an attempt to suppress. I met this woman, I fell in love with her, and I'm a public figure."^[12] In an interview in May 2007, she said "In terms of sexual orientation I don?t really feel I?ve changed... I?d been with men all my life, and I?d never fallen in love with a woman. But when I did, it didn?t seem so strange. I?m just a woman in love with another woman."^[10]

In March 2008, Fox News reported that Nixon has been in a relationship with Marinoni since 2003. "I'm in a fantastic relationship. It's been about four years", Nixon, 41 at the time, said."^[13] In April 2008, she received an award from the Point Foundation, which provides scholarships to gay students in the U.S., for being a role model for young gay people.^[14]

In an interview with Good Morning America that aired on April 15, 2008, Cynthia Nixon announced for the first time that she battled breast cancer, after being diagnosed during a routine mammogram in October, 2006.^[15] Initially she did not go public because of the stigma involved,^[16] but since then, she not only has openly admitted that she had cancer, she has become a breast cancer activist and was able to convince the head of NBC to air her breast cancer special in primetime.^[16] In 2008, she began to serve as Ambassador for Susan G. Komen for the Cure.^[17]