Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play
Encyclopedia
The Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play was first awarded at the 1974–1975 Drama Desk Award
Drama Desk Award
The Drama Desk Awards, which are given annually in a number of categories, are the only major New York theater honors for which productions on Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway compete against each other in the same category...

s and has been awarded every year since. Before the 21st Drama Desk Awards, acting awards were given without making distinctions between roles in straight dramas as opposed to musicals, nor were there separate categories for actors and actresses.

1970s

  • 1975: Ellen Burstyn
    Ellen Burstyn
    Ellen Burstyn is a leading American actress of film, stage, and television. Burstyn's career began in theatre during the late 1950s, and over the next ten years she appeared in several films and television series before joining the Actors Studio in 1967...

      – Same Time, Next Year
    Same Time, Next Year
    Same Time, Next Year is 1975 comedy play by Bernard Slade. The plot focuses on two people, married to others, who meet for a romantic tryst once a year for two dozen years.-Plot:...

    • Elizabeth Ashley
      Elizabeth Ashley
      Elizabeth Ashley is an American actress who first came to prominence as the ingenue in the Broadway play Take Her, She's Mine, which earned her a Tony Award as Best Featured Actress in a Play.-Early life:...

       – Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
      Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
      Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a play by Tennessee Williams. One of Williams's best-known works and his personal favorite, the play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955...

    • Entire female cast – Women Behind Bars
      Women Behind Bars
      Women Behind Bars is a play by Tom Eyen.A camp spoof of the exploitation films produced by Universal, Warner's, and Republic Pictures in the 1950s, this black comedy is set in the Women's House of Detention in Greenwich Village...

    • Tovah Feldshuh
      Tovah Feldshuh
      Tovah Feldshuh is an American actress, singer and playwright.-Early life:Terri Sue Feldshuh was born to a Jewish family in New York City, the daughter of Lillian and Sidney Feldshuh, who was a lawyer. She was raised in Scarsdale, New York, an affluent community in Westchester County and graduated...

       – Yentl the Yeshiva Boy
    • Rita Moreno
      Rita Moreno
      Rita Moreno is a Puerto Rican singer, dancer and actress. She is the only Hispanic and one of the few performers who have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony, and was the second Puerto Rican to win an Academy Award....

       – The Ritz
      The Ritz (play)
      The Ritz is a play by Terrence McNally. Actress Rita Moreno won a Tony Award for her performance as Googie Gomez in the 1975 Broadway production, which she and many others of the original cast reprised in a 1976 film version directed by Richard Lester....

    • Diana Rigg
      Diana Rigg
      Dame Enid Diana Elizabeth Rigg, DBE is an English actress. She is probably best known for her portrayals of Emma Peel in The Avengers and Countess Teresa di Vicenzo in the 1969 James Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service....

       – The Misanthrope
      The Misanthrope
      The Misanthrope is the first EP from metal band Darkest Hour. It was released in 1996 on the defunct label Death Truck Records. It is much more hardcore orientated metalcore unlike their later releases.- Track listing :# "Vise" - 5:30...

    • Maggie Smith
      Maggie Smith
      Dame Margaret Natalie Smith, DBE , better known as Maggie Smith, is an English film, stage, and television actress who made her stage debut in 1952 and is still performing after 59 years...

       – Private Lives
      Private Lives
      Private Lives is a 1930 comedy of manners in three acts by Noël Coward. It focuses on a divorced couple who discover that they are honeymooning with their new spouses in neighbouring rooms at the same hotel. Despite a perpetually stormy relationship, they realise that they still have feelings for...

    • Liv Ullman – A Doll's House
      A Doll's House
      A Doll's House is a three-act play in prose by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It premièred at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 21 December 1879, having been published earlier that month....

  • 1976: Rosemary Harris
    Rosemary Harris
    Rosemary Ann Harris is an English actress and a member of the American Theatre Hall of Fame. Throughout her career she has been nominated for an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award and has won a Golden Globe, an Emmy, a Tony Award, an Obie, and five Drama Desk Awards.-Early life:Harris was born in...

     – The Royal Family
    • Fran Brill
      Fran Brill
      Frances Joan "Fran" Brill , is an American actress and puppeteer, best known for her roles on Sesame Street.Brill was born in Chester, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Linette and Joseph M. Brill. Her father was a physician...

       – What Every Woman Knows
      What Every Woman Knows
      What Every Woman Knows is a four-act play written by J. M. Barrie. It was first presented by the impresario Charles Frohman at the Duke of York's Theatre in London on 3 September 1908...

    • Tovah Feldshuh
      Tovah Feldshuh
      Tovah Feldshuh is an American actress, singer and playwright.-Early life:Terri Sue Feldshuh was born to a Jewish family in New York City, the daughter of Lillian and Sidney Feldshuh, who was a lawyer. She was raised in Scarsdale, New York, an affluent community in Westchester County and graduated...

       – Yentl
      Yentl
      Yentl is a play by Leah Napolin and Isaac Bashevis Singer.Based on Singer's short story "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy," it centers on a young girl who defies tradition by discussing and debating Jewish law and theology with her rabbi father...

    • Lois Nettleton
      Lois Nettleton
      Lois June Nettleton was an American actress of film, stage, and television. She was Miss Chicago of 1948 as well as a semifinalist at that year's Miss America Pageant.-Early years:...

       – They Knew What They Wanted
      They Knew What They Wanted (play)
      They Knew What They Wanted is a 1924 play written by Sidney Howard that tells the story of Tony, an aging Italian winegrower in the California Napa Valley, who proposes by letter to Amy, a San Francisco waitress who waited on him once. Fearing that she will find him too old and ugly, Tony sends her...

    • Meryl Streep
      Meryl Streep
      Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep is an American actress who has worked in theatre, television and film.Streep made her professional stage debut in 1971's The Playboy of Seville, before her screen debut in the television movie The Deadliest Season in 1977. In that same year, she made her film debut with...

       – 27 Wagons Full of Cotton / A Memory of Two Mondays
      A Memory of Two Mondays
      A Memory of Two Mondays is a one-act play by Arthur Miller.Based on Miller's own experiences, the play focuses on a group of desperate workers earning their livings in a Brooklyn automobile parts warehouse during the Great Depression in the 1930s, a time of 25 percent unemployment in the United...

      / Secret Service / Trelawny of the "Wells"

  • 1977: Irene Worth
    Irene Worth
    Irene Worth, CBE was an American stage and screen actress who became one of the leading stars of the English and American theatre. -Early life:...

     – The Cherry Orchard
    The Cherry Orchard
    The Cherry Orchard is Russian playwright Anton Chekhov's last play. It premiered at the Moscow Art Theatre 17 January 1904 in a production directed by Constantin Stanislavski. Chekhov intended this play as a comedy and it does contain some elements of farce; however, Stanislavski insisted on...

    • Trazana Beverley
      Trazana Beverley
      Trazana Beverley is an American stage and film actress.She won a Tony Award for "Best Featured Actress in a Play" for the 1977 Broadway play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, having previously won a Theatre World Award for the Off-Broadway production. Beverley...

       – For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf
      For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf
      For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf is a 1975 experimental play by Ntozake Shange. Initially staged in California, it has been performed Off-Broadway and on Broadway, and adapted as a book, a television film, and a theatrical film...

    • Blythe Danner
      Blythe Danner
      Blythe Katherine Danner is an American actress. She is the mother of actress Gwyneth Paltrow and director Jake Paltrow.-Early life:...

       – The New York Idea
    • Cara Duff-MacCormick
      Cara Duff-MacCormick
      Cara Duff-MacCormick is a Canadian actress best known for her work within the American theatre.-Career:Born in Woodstock, Ontario, Duff-MacCormick studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City before making her professional debut Off-Broadway in December 1969 at the...

       – The Philanderer
      The Philanderer
      The Philanderer is a play by George Bernard Shaw.It was written in 1893 but the strict British Censorship laws at the time meant that it was not produced on stage until 1902....

    • Diane Ladd
      Diane Ladd
      Diane Ladd is an American actress, film director, producer and published author. She has appeared in over 120 roles, on television, and in miniseries and feature films, including Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore , Wild at Heart , Rambling Rose , Ghosts of Mississippi, Primary Colors, 28 Days , and...

       – Lu Ann Hampton Laverly
    • Sofia Landon – Peg O' My Heart
    • Dorothy McGuire
      Dorothy McGuire
      Dorothy Hackett McGuire was an American actress.-Career:Born in Omaha, Nebraska, she began her acting career on the stage at the Omaha Community Playhouse...

       – The Night of the Iguana
      The Night of the Iguana
      The Night of the Iguana is a stageplay written by American author Tennessee Williams, based on his 1948 short story. The play premiered on Broadway in 1961. Two film adaptations have been made, including the Academy Award-winning 1964 film of the same name....

  • 1978: Jessica Tandy
    Jessica Tandy
    Jessie Alice "Jessica" Tandy was an English-American stage and film actress.She first appeared on the London stage in 1926 at the age of 16, playing, among others, Katherine opposite Laurence Olivier's Henry V, and Cordelia opposite John Gielgud's King Lear. She also worked in British films...

     – The Gin Game
    The Gin Game
    The Gin Game is a two-person, two-act play by D.L. Coburn that premiered at American Theater Arts in Hollywood in September 1976, directed by Kip Niven. It was Coburn's first play, and the theater's first production.-Plot:...

    • Shirley Knight
      Shirley Knight
      Shirley Enola Knight is an American stage, film and television actress. She has been nominated twice for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, in 1960 for The Dark at the Top of the Stairs and in 1962 for Sweet Bird of Youth....

       – Landscape of the Body
      Landscape of the Body
      Landscape Of The Body is a two-act play by John Guare, written in 1977.-Synopsis:The play is episodic and non-linear, as it travels back and forth in time. The plot centers around a woman named Betty, whose son, Bert, was recently murdered and decapitated in lower Manhattan. The first and last...

    • Patricia Elliott
      Patricia Elliott
      Patricia Elliott is an American actress. She graduated from South High School in Denver.With many appearances on television, film and stage, Elliott currently portrays Renee Divine Buchanan on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live, a role she has played on-and-off since 1987...

       – Tartuffe
      Tartuffe
      Tartuffe is a comedy by Molière. It is one of his most famous plays.-History:Molière wrote Tartuffe in 1664...

    • Tamy Grimes – Tartuffe
      Tartuffe
      Tartuffe is a comedy by Molière. It is one of his most famous plays.-History:Molière wrote Tartuffe in 1664...

    • Helen Burns
      Helen Burns
      Helen Burns is a British actress mostly known for playing comedic roles. Burns is best known for her performance in the 1994 production of The Last Yankee at the Duke of York's in Brighton, England, for which she won a Laurence Olivier Award, and for her role in the British television series And...

       – Catsplay
    • Carol Mayo Jenkins
      Carol Mayo Jenkins
      Carol Mayo Jenkins is an American actress who is most famous for having played Elizabeth Sherwood in seasons 1-5 of the T.V. series Fame...

       – Zinnia
      Zinnia
      Zinnia is a genus of 20 species of annual and perennial plants of family Asteraceae, originally from scrub and dry grassland in an area stretching from the American Southwest to South America, but primarily Mexico, and notable for their solitary long-stemmed flowers that come in a variety of bright...

  • 1979: Constance Cummings
    Constance Cummings
    Constance Cummings, CBE was an American-born British actress, known for her work on both screen and stage.Born Constance Halverstadt in Seattle, Washington, the daughter of Dallas Vernon Halverstadt, a lawyer, and his wife, Kate Logan Cummings, a concert soprano. she began as a stage actress,...

     – Wings
    Wings (play)
    Wings is a 1978 play by American playwright Arthur Kopit. Originating as a radio play, it was later adapted for stage and screen.In 1976, Kopit was commissioned to write an original radio play by the NPR drama project Earplay...

    and Carole Shelley
    Carole Shelley
    Carole Shelley is an English actress. Among her many stage roles are the character of Madame Morrible in the original Broadway cast of the musical Wicked.-Life and career:...

     – The Elephant Man
    • Kate Reid
      Kate Reid
      Kate Reid, OC was a Canadian stage, film and television actress.-Life and career:Daphne Kate Reid was born in London, England, the daughter of Canadian parents, Helen Isabel and Walter Clarke Reid, who was a former Bengal Lancer in the Indian army and a retired colonel...

       – Bosoms and Neglect
      Bosoms and Neglect
      Bosoms and Neglect is a play by American playwright John Guare, first staged in 1979 at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Illinois.-Productions:...

    • Frances Sternhagen
      Frances Sternhagen
      Frances Hussey Sternhagen is an American actress. Sternhagen has appeared on and off Broadway, in movies, and on TV since the 1950s.-Personal life:...

       – On Golden Pond
    • Susan Stevens – The Price of Genius


1980s

  • 1980: Pat Carroll
    Pat Carroll (actress)
    Patricia Ann “Pat” Carroll is an American actress. She performed in numerous stage productions, and portrayed the roles of "Bunny Halper" on CBS's The Danny Thomas Show, Shirley Feeney's mother on ABC's Laverne and Shirley, and is the voice of the villainous Ursula in The Little Mermaid film...

     – Gertrude Stein
    • Blythe Danner
      Blythe Danner
      Blythe Katherine Danner is an American actress. She is the mother of actress Gwyneth Paltrow and director Jake Paltrow.-Early life:...

       – Betrayal
      Betrayal (play)
      Betrayal is a play written by Harold Pinter in 1978. Critically regarded as one of the English playwright's major dramatic works, it features his characteristically economical dialogue, characters' hidden emotions and veiled motivations, and their self-absorbed competitive one-upmanship,...

    • Phyllis Frelich
      Phyllis Frelich
      Phyllis Frelich is an American actress, and, with Marlee Matlin, one of the two pre-eminent deaf actresses in the United States. Frelich was born in Devils Lake, North Dakota to deaf parents and is the oldest of 9 children...

       – Children of a Lesser God
      Children of a Lesser God (play)
      Children of a Lesser God is a play by Mark Medoff, published in 1980 focusing on the conflicted professional and romantic relationship between deaf former student, Sarah Norman, and her teacher, James Leeds. The play was specially written for the Deaf actress Phyllis Frelich, based to some extent...

    • Mary Tyler Moore
      Mary Tyler Moore
      Mary Tyler Moore is an American actress, primarily known for her roles in television sitcoms. Moore is best known for The Mary Tyler Moore Show , in which she starred as Mary Richards, a 30-something single woman who worked as a local news producer in Minneapolis, and for her earlier role as...

       – Whose Life Is It Anyway?
      Whose Life is it Anyway?
      Whose Life Is It Anyway? is a play by Brian Clark adapted from his 1972 television play of the same title. The play premiered at the Mermaid Theatre in London's West End in 1978 starring Tom Conti as Ken.-Plot:...

    • Gerald Hiken – Strider
    • Susan Sarandon
      Susan Sarandon
      Susan Sarandon is an American actress. She has worked in films and television since 1969, and won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the 1995 film Dead Man Walking. She had also been nominated for the award for four films before that and has received other recognition for her...

       – A Coupla Chicks
  • 1981: Joan Copeland
    Joan Copeland
    Joan Copeland is an American actress and the younger sister of celebrated playwright Arthur Miller. She began her career appearing in theatre in New York City during the mid 1940s. She moved into television and film during the 1950s while still maintaining an active stage career...

     – The American Clock
    The American Clock
    The American Clock is a play by Arthur Miller. The play is about 1930s America during The Great Depression. It is based in part on Studs Terkel's Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. The play premiered on Broadway at the Biltmore Theatre on November 11, 1980; closing on November 30,...

    • Eva La Gallienne – To Grandmother's House We Go
    • Mary Beth Hurt
      Mary Beth Hurt
      Mary Beth Hurt is an American actress of stage and screen.-Personal life:Hurt was born Mary Supinger in 1946 in Marshalltown, Iowa, the daughter of Delores Lenore and Forrest Clayton Supinger. Her childhood babysitter was actress Jean Seberg, also a Marshalltown native...

       – Crimes of the Heart
      Crimes of the Heart
      Crimes of the Heart is a play by Beth Henley.-Synopsis:At the core of the tragic comedy are the three Magrath sisters, Meg, Babe, and Lenny, who reunite at Old Granddaddy's home in Hazlehurst, Mississippi after Babe shoots her abusive husband. The trio was raised in a dysfunctional family with a...

    • Amanda Plummer – A Taste of Honey
      A Taste of Honey
      A Taste of Honey is the first play by the British dramatist Shelagh Delaney, written when she was 18. It was initially intended as a novel, but she turned it into a play because she hoped to revitalize British theatre and to address social issues that she felt were not being presented...

    • Elizabeth Taylor
      Elizabeth Taylor
      Dame Elizabeth Rosemond "Liz" Taylor, DBE was a British-American actress. From her early years as a child star with MGM, she became one of the great screen actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age...

       – A Taste of Honey
      A Taste of Honey
      A Taste of Honey is the first play by the British dramatist Shelagh Delaney, written when she was 18. It was initially intended as a novel, but she turned it into a play because she hoped to revitalize British theatre and to address social issues that she felt were not being presented...

  • 1982: Zoe Caldwell
    Zoe Caldwell
    Zoe Caldwell, OBE is an Australian-born actress.-Early life:She was born as Ada Caldwell in Melbourne, Australia and was raised in the suburb of Balwyn in Yongala Street. Her father, Edgar, was a plumber and her mother, Zoe, was a taxi dancer. Caldwell's mother, Zoe, had a Peugeot of 1950 vintage...

     – Medea
    Medea (play)
    Medea is an ancient Greek tragedy written by Euripides, based upon the myth of Jason and Medea and first produced in 431 BC. The plot centers on the barbarian protagonist as she finds her position in the Greek world threatened, and the revenge she takes against her husband Jason who has betrayed...

  • 1983: Jessica Tandy
    Jessica Tandy
    Jessie Alice "Jessica" Tandy was an English-American stage and film actress.She first appeared on the London stage in 1926 at the age of 16, playing, among others, Katherine opposite Laurence Olivier's Henry V, and Cordelia opposite John Gielgud's King Lear. She also worked in British films...

     – Foxfire
    Foxfire (play)
    Foxfire is a play by Susan Cooper and Hume Cronyn based on the Foxfire books, about Appalachian culture and traditions in north Georgia. The 1982 Broadway production starred Jessica Tandy, who won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play and the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play...

    • Suzanne Bertish
      Suzanne Bertish
      Suzanne C. Bertish is an English actress.A former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Bertish has appeared in many productions with them, including their marathon eight-and-a-half hour version of Charles Dickens's The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, in which she played three roles...

       – Skirmishes
    • Colleen Dewhurst
      Colleen Dewhurst
      Colleen Rose Dewhurst was a Canadian-American actress known for a while as "the Queen of Off-Broadway." In her autobiography, Dewhurst wrote: "I had moved so quickly from one Off-Broadway production to the next that I was known, at one point, as the 'Queen of Off-Broadway'...

       – Queen and the Rebels
    • Thuli Dumakude – Poppi Nongena
    • Christine Estabrook
      Christine Estabrook
      Christine Estabrook is an American television and film actress. She has been featured in several motion pictures mostly in supporting roles...

       – Win/Lose/Draw
    • Susan Sarandon
      Susan Sarandon
      Susan Sarandon is an American actress. She has worked in films and television since 1969, and won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the 1995 film Dead Man Walking. She had also been nominated for the award for four films before that and has received other recognition for her...

       – Extremities
      Extremities (play)
      (This article is about the off-Broadway play. For the 1986 film, see Extremities (film)Extremities is a play by William Mastrosimone that was first performed off Broadway in 1982...

  • 1984: Joan Allen
    Joan Allen
    Joan Allen is an American actress. She worked in theatre, television and film during her early career, and achieved recognition for her Broadway debut in Burn This, winning a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play in 1989.She has received three Academy Award nominations;...

     – And a Nightingale Sang
    And a Nightingale Sang
    And a Nightingale Sang is a play by British playwright C.P. Taylor and commissioned by Newcastle upon Tyne's Live Theatre Company. The play was made into a TV play in 1989 by Jack Rosenthal for Tyne Tees Television....

    • Rosemary Harris
      Rosemary Harris
      Rosemary Ann Harris is an English actress and a member of the American Theatre Hall of Fame. Throughout her career she has been nominated for an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award and has won a Golden Globe, an Emmy, a Tony Award, an Obie, and five Drama Desk Awards.-Early life:Harris was born in...

       – Heartbreak House
      Heartbreak House
      Heartbreak House is a play written by George Bernard Shaw, first published in 1919 and first played at the Garrick Theatre in 1920. According to A. C. Ward, the work argues that "cultured, leisured Europe" was drifting toward destruction, and that "Those in a position to guide Europe to safety...

    • Kate Nelligan
      Kate Nelligan
      Patricia Colleen "Kate" Nelligan is a Canadian BAFTA award winning stage, film and television actress.-Early life:Nelligan, the fourth of six children, was born in London, Ontario, the daughter of Josephine Alice , a schoolteacher, and Patrick Joseph Nelligan, a factory repairman and municipal...

       – A Moon for the Misbegotten
      A Moon for the Misbegotten
      A Moon for the Misbegotten is a play by Eugene O'Neill. The play can be thought of as a sequel to the autobiographical Long Day's Journey into Night...

    • Nausko Ohama – Sound and Beauty
      Sound and Beauty
      Sound and Beauty is the omnibus title of two plays by American playwright David Henry Hwang. Hwang's fourth play, The House of Sleeping Beauties, was adapted from Yasunari Kawabata's novella House of the Sleeping Beauties. It tells the story of the narrator of that novella investigating the brothel...

    • Marilyn Rockefellow – Open Admissions
      Open Admissions
      Open Admissions is a play in 2 Acts by Shirley Lauro that premiered in 1982 at the Long Wharf Theatre under the direction of Arvin Brown. The play had its Broadway debut on January 29, 1984 at the Music Box Theatre where it ran for a total of 17 performances...

    • Irene Worth
      Irene Worth
      Irene Worth, CBE was an American stage and screen actress who became one of the leading stars of the English and American theatre. -Early life:...

       – The Golden Age
  • 1985: Rosemary Harris
    Rosemary Harris
    Rosemary Ann Harris is an English actress and a member of the American Theatre Hall of Fame. Throughout her career she has been nominated for an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award and has won a Golden Globe, an Emmy, a Tony Award, an Obie, and five Drama Desk Awards.-Early life:Harris was born in...

     – Pack of Lies
    Pack of Lies
    Pack of Lies is a 1983 play by English writer Hugh Whitemore.Based on a true story, the plot centres on Bob and Barbara Jackson and their teenage daughter Julie The Jacksons are friendly with their neighbours, Peter and Helen Kroger, until the couple is...

    • Stockard Channing
      Stockard Channing
      Stockard Channing is an American stage, film and television actress. She is known for her portrayal of First Lady Abbey Bartlet in the NBC television series The West Wing; for playing Betty Rizzo in the film Grease; and for her role as Ouisa Kittredge in the play Six Degrees of Separation and its...

       – A Day in the Death of Joe Egg
      A Day in the Death of Joe Egg
      A Day in the Death of Joe Egg is a 1967 play by English playwright Peter Nichols, first staged at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, Scotland before transferring to London's West End theatres in 1968.-Plot summary:Characters* Bri* Grace* Joe* Freddie...

    • Roxanne Hart
      Roxanne Hart
      Roxanne Hart is an American television, film and stage actress. She may be best known for her role as Brenda Wyatt in the 1986 film Highlander. She is also known for the role of Nurse Camille Shutt on the Medical drama Chicago Hope....

       – Digby
    • Lynn Redgrave
      Lynn Redgrave
      Lynn Rachel Redgrave, OBE was an English actress.A member of the well-known British family of actors, Redgrave trained in London before making her theatrical debut in 1962...

      Aren't We All?
      Aren't We All?
      Aren't We All? is a play by Frederick Lonsdale.At the core of the drawing room comedy's slim plot is the Hon. William Tatham who, having been consigned to the proverbial doghouse for a romantic indiscretion, is determined to catch his self-righteous wife in an extramarital kiss of her own, while a...

    • Elizabeth Wilson
      Elizabeth Wilson
      Elizabeth Welter Wilson is an American actress. She was elected to the Theatre Hall of Fame in 2007.-Life and career:Wilson was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the daughter of Marie Ethel and Henry Dunning Wilson, who was an insurance agent...

       – Salonika

  • 1986: Lily Tomlin
    Lily Tomlin
    Mary Jean "Lily" Tomlin is an American actress, comedienne, writer, and producer. Tomlin has been a major force in American comedy since the late 1960's when she began a career as a stand up comedian and became a featured performer on television's Laugh-in...

     – The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe
    • Joan Allen
      Joan Allen
      Joan Allen is an American actress. She worked in theatre, television and film during her early career, and achieved recognition for her Broadway debut in Burn This, winning a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play in 1989.She has received three Academy Award nominations;...

       – The Marriage of Bette and Boo
    • Stockard Channing
      Stockard Channing
      Stockard Channing is an American stage, film and television actress. She is known for her portrayal of First Lady Abbey Bartlet in the NBC television series The West Wing; for playing Betty Rizzo in the film Grease; and for her role as Ouisa Kittredge in the play Six Degrees of Separation and its...

       – House of Blue Leaves
    • Judith Ivey
      Judith Ivey
      Judith Lee Ivey is an American actress and director.-Personal life:Ivey was born in El Paso, Texas, the daughter of Dorothy Lee , a teacher, and Nathan Aldean Ivey, a college instructor and dean. She spent 1965-1968 in Dowagiac, Michigan, where she attended Union High School through tenth grade...

       – Precious Sons
    • Swoosie Kurtz
      Swoosie Kurtz
      Swoosie Kurtz is an American actress. She began her career in theater during the 1970s and shortly thereafter began a career in television, garnering ten nominations and winning one Emmy Award. Her most famous television project was her role on the 1990s NBC drama Sisters...

       – House of Blue Leaves
    • Kathryn Pogson
      Kathryn Pogson
      Kathryn Pogson is a film and stage actress. She appeared in Terry Gilliam's 1985 cult film Brazil. She received a Drama Desk Award nomination for her performance in the 1986 New York production of Aunt Dan and Lemon....

       – Aunt Dan and Lemon
      Aunt Dan and Lemon
      Aunt Dan and Lemon is a play by Wallace Shawn. The world premiere was produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival at the Royal Court Theatre in London, England on August 27, 1985, under the direction of Max Stafford-Clark. This production opened off-Broadway at The Public Theatre on October 21,...

  • 1987: Linda Lavin
    Linda Lavin
    Linda Lavin is an American singer and actress. She is best known for playing the title character in the sitcom Alice and for her Broadway performances.After acting as a child, Lavin joined the Compass Players in the late 1950s...

     – Broadway Bound
    Broadway Bound
    Broadway Bound is a semi-autobiographical play by Neil Simon. It is the last chapter in his Eugene trilogy, following Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi Blues....

    • Robin Bartlett
      Robin Bartlett
      Robin Bartlett is an American actress who grew up in Switzerland.She was formerly married to the actor Alan Rosenberg....

       – The Early Girl
    • Lindsay Duncan
      Lindsay Duncan
      Lindsay Vere Duncan, CBE is a Scottish stage, television and film actress. On stage she won two Olivier Awards and a Tony Award for her performance in Les Liaisons dangereuses and Private Lives , and she starred in several plays by Harold Pinter. Her most famous roles on television include:...

       – Les Liaisons Dangereuses
      Les liaisons dangereuses (play)
      Les liaisons dangereuses is a play by Christopher Hampton adapted from the 1782 novel of the same title by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. The plot focuses on the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, rivals who use sex as a weapon of humiliation and degradation, all the while enjoying their...

    • Dana Ivey
      Dana Ivey
      Dana Robins Ivey is an American character actress, who has performed on Broadway and other stage roles, in film and on television.-Early life and family:Ivey was born in Atlanta, Georgia...

       – Driving Miss Daisy
      Driving Miss Daisy
      Driving Miss Daisy is a 1989 American comedy-drama film adapted from the Alfred Uhry play of the same name. The film was directed by Bruce Beresford, with Morgan Freeman reprising his role as Hoke Colburn and Jessica Tandy playing Miss Daisy...

    • Amy Madigan
      Amy Madigan
      Amy Marie Madigan is an American actress who is known for her role as Annie Kinsella in the 1989 film Field of Dreams and Iris Crowe in the HBO television series Carnivale...

       – The Lucky Spot
    • Dianne Wiest
      Dianne Wiest
      Dianne Wiest is an American actress. She has had a successful career on stage, television, and film, and has won two Academy Awards, two Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe Award. Wiest has also been nominated for a BAFTA Award.-Early life:...

       – Hunting Cockroaches
  • 1988: Stockard Channing
    Stockard Channing
    Stockard Channing is an American stage, film and television actress. She is known for her portrayal of First Lady Abbey Bartlet in the NBC television series The West Wing; for playing Betty Rizzo in the film Grease; and for her role as Ouisa Kittredge in the play Six Degrees of Separation and its...

     – Woman in Mind
    Woman In Mind
    Woman in Mind is the 32nd play by English playwright, Alan Ayckbourn. It was premiered at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round, Scarborough, in 1985. Despite pedestrian reviews by many critics, strong audience reaction resulted in a transfer to London's West End...

    • Kathy Bates
      Kathy Bates
      Kathleen Doyle "Kathy" Bates is an American actress and director.After several small roles in film and television, Bates rose to prominence with her performance in Misery , for which she won both the Academy Award for Best Actress and a Golden Globe...

       – Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune
    • Amy Irving
      Amy Irving
      Amy Davis Irving is an American actress, known for her roles in the films Crossing Delancey, The Fury, Carrie, and Yentl as well as acclaimed roles on Broadway and Off-Broadway. She has been nominated for an Academy Award, two Golden Globes, and has won an Obie award...

       – The Road to Mecca
      The Road to Mecca
      The Road to Mecca is a play by South Africa's Athol Fugard.It was inspired by the story of Helen Martins who lived in Nieu-Bethesda, Eastern Cape, South Africa and created The Owl House, now a national monument....

    • Glenda Jackson
      Glenda Jackson
      Glenda May Jackson, CBE is a British Labour Party politician and former actress. She has been a Member of Parliament since 1992, and currently represents Hampstead and Kilburn. She previously served as MP for Hampstead and Highgate...

       – Macbeth
      Macbeth
      The Tragedy of Macbeth is a play by William Shakespeare about a regicide and its aftermath. It is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy and is believed to have been written sometime between 1603 and 1607...

    • E. Katherine Kerr – Laughing Wild
      Laughing Wild
      Laughing Wild is a 1987 play written by Christopher Durang.The show is written for one actor and one actress. The woman's character is emotional and unstable, and talks about hitting someone in the supermarket who wouldn't get out of the way of the tuna fish she wanted to buy. The man's character...

    • Gordana Rashovich – Shayna Maidel
  • 1989: Pauline Collins
    Pauline Collins
    Pauline Collins, OBE is an English actress of the stage, television, and film. She first came to prominence portraying Sarah Moffat in Upstairs, Downstairs and its spin-off Thomas & Sarah during the 1970s. She later drew acclaim for playing the title role in the play Shirley Valentine for which...

     – Shirley Valentine
    Shirley Valentine
    Shirley Valentine is a one-character play by Willy Russell. Taking the form of a monologue by a middle-aged, working class Liverpool housewife, it focuses on her life before and after a transforming holiday abroad.-Plot:...

    • Joan Allen
      Joan Allen
      Joan Allen is an American actress. She worked in theatre, television and film during her early career, and achieved recognition for her Broadway debut in Burn This, winning a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play in 1989.She has received three Academy Award nominations;...

       – The Heidi Chronicles
      The Heidi Chronicles
      The Heidi Chronicles is a 1988 play by Wendy Wasserstein. The play won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.-Production history:A workshop production at Seattle Repertory Theatre was held in April 1988, directed by Daniel J. Sullivan....

    • Robin Bartlett
      Robin Bartlett
      Robin Bartlett is an American actress who grew up in Switzerland.She was formerly married to the actor Alan Rosenberg....

       – Reckless
    • Colleen Dewhurst
      Colleen Dewhurst
      Colleen Rose Dewhurst was a Canadian-American actress known for a while as "the Queen of Off-Broadway." In her autobiography, Dewhurst wrote: "I had moved so quickly from one Off-Broadway production to the next that I was known, at one point, as the 'Queen of Off-Broadway'...

       – Long Day's Journey Into Night
      Long Day's Journey Into Night
      Long Day's Journey Into Night is a 1956 drama in four acts written by American playwright Eugene O'Neill. The play is widely considered to be his masterwork...

    • Gloria Foster
      Gloria Foster
      Gloria Foster was an American actress, most known for her stage performances portraying an array of African-American characters, including her acclaimed roles in plays In White America and Having Our Say, winning three Obie Awards during her career.In films, she was perhaps best known as The...

       – The Forbidden City
    • Nancy Marchand
      Nancy Marchand
      Nancy Marchand was an American actress, whose career encompassed both stage and screen. She appeared in various theatre productions throughout the early 1950s, before being offered roles on film and television....

       – The Cocktail Hour
      The Cocktail Hour
      The Cocktail Hour is a comedy of manners by A. R. Gurney. It premiered in June 1988 in San Diego, California at the Old Globe Theatre and, on October 20, 1988, in New York City at the Off Broadway Promenade Theatre...



1990s

  • 1990: Geraldine James
    Geraldine James
    Geraldine James, OBE is an English actress.-Early life and family:James was born in Maidenhead, Berkshire, to a cardiologist father...

     – The Merchant of Venice
    The Merchant of Venice
    The Merchant of Venice is a tragic comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1596 and 1598. Though classified as a comedy in the First Folio and sharing certain aspects with Shakespeare's other romantic comedies, the play is perhaps most remembered for its dramatic...

    • Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio
      Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio
      Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is an American actress and singer known for her role as Carmen in The Color of Money, as well as for her roles as Lindsey Brigman in The Abyss, Gina Montana in Scarface, and Maid Marian in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.-Personal life:Mastrantonio was born in Lombard,...

       – Twelfth Night
    • S. Epatha Merkerson
      S. Epatha Merkerson
      S. Epatha Merkerson is an American film, stage, and television actress. She has won a Golden Globe, Emmy Awards, Screen Actors Guild Awards, Obie Award and four NAACP Image Awards. She has also received two Tony Award nominations...

       – The Piano Lesson
      The Piano Lesson
      The Piano Lesson is a 1990 play by American playwright August Wilson. The Piano Lesson is the fifth play in Wilson's The Pittsburgh Cycle. Wilson began writing this play by playing with the various answers regarding the possibility of "acquir[ing] a sense of self-worth by denying ones past"...

    • Mary Louise Parker – Prelude to a Kiss
  • 1991: Mercedes Ruehl
    Mercedes Ruehl
    Mercedes J. Ruehl is an American theater, television and film actor.-Personal life:Ruehl was born in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York City, the daughter of Mercedes J., a school teacher, and Vincent Ruehl, an FBI agent. She was raised Catholic. Her father was of German and Irish descent and her...

     – Lost in Yonkers
    Lost in Yonkers
    Lost in Yonkers is a 1991 Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Neil Simon. After eleven previews, the Broadway production, produced by Emanuel Azenberg and directed by Gene Saks, opened on February 21, 1991 at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, where it ran for 780 performances...

    • Stockard Channing
      Stockard Channing
      Stockard Channing is an American stage, film and television actress. She is known for her portrayal of First Lady Abbey Bartlet in the NBC television series The West Wing; for playing Betty Rizzo in the film Grease; and for her role as Ouisa Kittredge in the play Six Degrees of Separation and its...

       – Six Degrees of Separation
      Six Degrees of Separation (film)
      Six Degrees of Separation is a 1990 play written by John Guare that premiered at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center on May 16, 1990, directed by Jerry Zaks and starring Stockard Channing...

    • Angela Goethals
      Angela Goethals
      Angela Bethany Goethals is an American actress. She is known for her recurring guest appearance on 24 and her roles in the TV sitcom Phenom and the movie Home Alone.- Early life and career :...

       – The Good Times Are Killing Me
    • Audra Lindley
      Audra Lindley
      Audra Marie Lindley was an American actress, most famous for her role as landlady Helen Roper on the sitcom Three's Company and its spin-off, The Ropers.-Career:...

       – About Time
      About Time (play)
      About Time is a theatrical play written by playwright Tom Cole that debuted in 1990 Off Broadway at the John Houseman Theater. This two-character play featured an elderly couple, identified only as Old Man and Old Woman, chatting and arguing about matters around the subject of death...

  • 1992: Laura Esterman
    Laura Esterman
    Laura Esterman is an American actress known for portraying Ruby the Galactic Gumshoe in contemporary radio dramas and for her Drama Desk Award and Obie Award winning performance in the 1992 original stage production of Scott McPherson's Marvin's Room.-Life and career:Esterman was born in New York...

     – Marvin's Room
    Marvin's Room (play)
    Marvin's Room is a play by written by Scott McPherson that premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons on 15 November 1991, and later adapted for a film of the same title in 1996 ....

    • Jane Alexander
      Jane Alexander
      Jane Alexander is an American actress, author, and former director of the National Endowment for the Arts. Although perhaps best known for playing the female lead in The Great White Hope on both stage and screen, Alexander has played a wide array of roles in both theater and film and has committed...

       – The Visit
      The Visit
      The Visit is a 1956 tragicomic play by Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt.-Plot summary:...

    • Glenn Close
      Glenn Close
      Glenn Close is an American actress and singer of theatre and film, known for her roles as a femme fatale Glenn Close (born March 19, 1947) is an American actress and singer of theatre and film, known for her roles as a femme fatale Glenn Close (born March 19, 1947) is an American actress and...

       – Death and the Maiden
      Death and the Maiden (play)
      Death and the Maiden is a 1990 play by Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman. The world premiere was staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London on 9 July 1991, directed by Lindsay Posner...

    • Deborah Hedwall – Sight Unseen
      Sight Unseen (play)
      Sight Unseen is a play by Donald Margulies. At its center is Jonathan Waxman, a Brooklyn Jew who has become a very wealthy critically acclaimed artist. Happily married, with a baby on the way, he travels to London for a retrospective of his work...

  • 1993: Jane Alexander
    Jane Alexander
    Jane Alexander is an American actress, author, and former director of the National Endowment for the Arts. Although perhaps best known for playing the female lead in The Great White Hope on both stage and screen, Alexander has played a wide array of roles in both theater and film and has committed...

     – The Sisters Rosensweig
    The Sisters Rosensweig
    The Sisters Rosensweig is a play by Wendy Wasserstein. The play focuses on three Jewish- American sisters and their lives. It "broke theatrical ground by concentrating on a non-traditional cast of three middle-aged women." Wasserstein received the William Inge Award for Distinguished Achievement in...

    • Juliana Carneiro da Cunha
      Juliana Carneiro da Cunha
      Juliana Carneiro da Cunha is a Brazilian and French actress and dancer . She works at the Théâtre du Soleil, in Paris, since 1990.-Theater:...

       – Les Atrides
    • Christine Lahti
      Christine Lahti
      Christine Lahti is an American actress and film director. Lahti has had a successful career in television and film. Throughout her career she has garnered 2 Golden Globe Awards from 8 Nominations, An Emmy Award from 6 Nominations and 2 Academy Award nominations...

       – Three Hotels
    • Debra Monk
      Debra Monk
      Debra Monk is an American actress, singer, and writer.Monk was born in Middletown, Ohio. She was voted "best personality" by the graduating class at Wheaton High School in Silver Spring, Maryland. She graduated from Frostburg State University in 1963...

       – Redwood Curtain
      Redwood Curtain
      Redwood Curtain is a 1995 American dramatic TV movie created by Hallmark Hall of Fame, and directed by John Korty based upon the 1993 Broadway play of the same name by Lanford Wilson. Starring Jeff Daniels, Lea Salonga, Debra Monk and John Lithgow, the film debuted on ABC on April 23,...

    • Natasha Richardson
      Natasha Richardson
      Natasha Jane Richardson was an English actress of stage and screen. A member of the Redgrave family, she was the daughter of actress Vanessa Redgrave and director/producer Tony Richardson and the granddaughter of Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson...

       – Anna Christie
      Anna Christie
      Anna Christie is a play in four acts by Eugene O'Neill. It made its Broadway debut at the Vanderbilt Theatre on November 2, 1921. O'Neill received the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his work.-Plot summary:...

  • 1994: Myra Carter
    Myra Carter
    Myra Carter is an award-winning American actress of stage, screen and television.-Career:Carter is most admired for her work on stage and in particular the works of Edward Albee including the original casts of Three Tall Women and All Over and the revivals of The American Dream and The Sandbox...

     – Three Tall Women
    Three Tall Women
    Three Tall Women is a play by Edward Albee, which won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Albee's third.-Characters:* A: She is a very old woman in her 90s. She is thin, autocratic, proud, and wealthy. She also has a mild case of Alzheimer's disease. * B: B is A's 52 year-old version, to whom she...

    • Kathleen Chalfant
      Kathleen Chalfant
      -Life and career:Chalfant was born as in San Francisco, California and raised in her parents' boarding house in Oakland. Her father, William Bishop, was an officer in the Coast Guard...

       – Angels in America: Perestroika
    • Amy Irving
      Amy Irving
      Amy Davis Irving is an American actress, known for her roles in the films Crossing Delancey, The Fury, Carrie, and Yentl as well as acclaimed roles on Broadway and Off-Broadway. She has been nominated for an Academy Award, two Golden Globes, and has won an Obie award...

       – Broken Glass
      Broken Glass (play)
      Broken Glass is a 1994 play by Arthur Miller, focusing on a couple in New York City in 1938, the same time of Kristallnacht, in Nazi Germany. The play's title is derived from Kristallnacht, which is also known as the Night of Broken Glass.-Characters:...

    • Diana Rigg
      Diana Rigg
      Dame Enid Diana Elizabeth Rigg, DBE is an English actress. She is probably best known for her portrayals of Emma Peel in The Avengers and Countess Teresa di Vicenzo in the 1969 James Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service....

       – Medea
      Medea (play)
      Medea is an ancient Greek tragedy written by Euripides, based upon the myth of Jason and Medea and first produced in 431 BC. The plot centers on the barbarian protagonist as she finds her position in the Greek world threatened, and the revenge she takes against her husband Jason who has betrayed...

    • Joan Rivers
      Joan Rivers
      Joan Rivers is an American comedian, television personality and actress. She is known for her brash manner; her loud, raspy voice with a heavy New York accent; and her numerous cosmetic surgeries...

       – Sally Marr...and Her Escorts
    • Harriet Walter
      Harriet Walter
      Dame Harriet Mary Walter, DBE is a British actress.-Personal life:She is the niece of renowned British actor Sir Christopher Lee, as the daughter of his elder sister Xandra Lee. On her father's side she is a great-great-great-granddaughter of John Walter, founder of The TimesShe was educated at...

       – Three Birds Alighting on a Field
      Three Birds Alighting on a Field
      Three Birds Alighting on a Field is a 1992 play by Timberlake Wertenbaker. Set in the 1980s, it tells the story of various characters associated with a failing art gallery and an opera house, and their attempts improve their prestige....

  • 1995: Cherry Jones
    Cherry Jones
    Cherry Jones is an American actress and recipient of the 2009 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress – Drama Series and the 2005 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play.-Career:...

     – The Heiress
    The Heiress (play)
    The Heiress is a 1947 play by American playwrights Ruth and Augustus Goetz adapted from the 1880 Henry James novel, Washington Square. The play opened on Broadway at the Biltmore Theatre on 29 September 1947 directed by Jed Harris starring Wendy Hiller, Basil Rathbone, and Peter Cookson...

    • Mary Alice
      Mary Alice
      Mary Alice is an American actress.Alice was born Mary Alice Smith in Indianola, Mississippi, the daughter of Ozelar and Sam Smith. In 1987 she received a Tony for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her work in Fences...

       – Having Our Say
    • Stockard Channing
      Stockard Channing
      Stockard Channing is an American stage, film and television actress. She is known for her portrayal of First Lady Abbey Bartlet in the NBC television series The West Wing; for playing Betty Rizzo in the film Grease; and for her role as Ouisa Kittredge in the play Six Degrees of Separation and its...

       – Hapgood
      Hapgood
      Hapgood is a play by Tom Stoppard, first produced in 1988. It is mainly about espionage, focusing on a British female spymaster and her juggling of career and motherhood...

    • Linda Lavin
      Linda Lavin
      Linda Lavin is an American singer and actress. She is best known for playing the title character in the sitcom Alice and for her Broadway performances.After acting as a child, Lavin joined the Compass Players in the late 1950s...

       – Death Defying Acts
    • Helen Mirren
      Helen Mirren
      Dame Helen Mirren, DBE is an English actor. She has won an Academy Award for Best Actress, four SAG Awards, four BAFTAs, three Golden Globes, four Emmy Awards, and two Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Awards.-Early life and family:...

       – A Month in the Country
      Ivan Turgenev
      Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His first major publication, a short story collection entitled A Sportsman's Sketches, is a milestone of Russian Realism, and his novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century...

    • Mercedes Ruehl
      Mercedes Ruehl
      Mercedes J. Ruehl is an American theater, television and film actor.-Personal life:Ruehl was born in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York City, the daughter of Mercedes J., a school teacher, and Vincent Ruehl, an FBI agent. She was raised Catholic. Her father was of German and Irish descent and her...

       – The Rose Tattoo
      The Rose Tattoo
      - External links :*...


  • 1996: Zoe Caldwell
    Zoe Caldwell
    Zoe Caldwell, OBE is an Australian-born actress.-Early life:She was born as Ada Caldwell in Melbourne, Australia and was raised in the suburb of Balwyn in Yongala Street. Her father, Edgar, was a plumber and her mother, Zoe, was a taxi dancer. Caldwell's mother, Zoe, had a Peugeot of 1950 vintage...

     – Master Class
    Master Class
    Master Class is a play by Terrence McNally, with incidental music by Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, and Vincenzo Bellini.The play originally was staged by the Philadelphia Theatre Company and the Mark Taper Forum. After twelve previews, the Broadway production, directed by Leonard Foglia, opened...

    • Catherine Byrne – Molly Sweeney
      Molly Sweeney
      Molly Sweeney is a two-act play by Brian Friel. It tells the story of its title character, Molly, a woman blind since infancy, who undergoes an operation to try to restore her sight. Like Friel's Faith Healer, the play tells Molly's story through monologues by three characters, in this case Molly,...

    • Uta Hagen
      Uta Hagen
      Uta Thyra Hagen was a German-born American actress and drama teacher. She originated the role of Martha in the 1963 Broadway premiere of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee...

       – Mrs. Klein
    • Lisagay Hamilton – Valley Song
    • Rosemary Harris
      Rosemary Harris
      Rosemary Ann Harris is an English actress and a member of the American Theatre Hall of Fame. Throughout her career she has been nominated for an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award and has won a Golden Globe, an Emmy, a Tony Award, an Obie, and five Drama Desk Awards.-Early life:Harris was born in...

       – A Delicate Balance
    • Sarah Jessica Parker
      Sarah Jessica Parker
      Sarah Jessica Parker is an American film, television, and theater actress and producer.She is best known for her leading role as Carrie Bradshaw on the HBO television series Sex and the City , for which she won four Golden Globe Awards, three Screen Actors Guild Awards, and two Emmy Awards...

       – Sylvia
      Sylvia (play)
      Sylvia is a play about a dog, the couple who adopts her,and the drama that results. It was written by A. R. Gurney and first produced in 1995....

  • 1997: Janet McTeer
    Janet McTeer
    Janet McTeer, OBE is a British actress.-Life and career:McTeer was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, United Kingdom, the daughter of Jean and Alan McTeer...

     – A Doll's House
    A Doll's House
    A Doll's House is a three-act play in prose by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It premièred at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 21 December 1879, having been published earlier that month....

    • Jayne Atkinson
      Jayne Atkinson
      Jayne Atkinson is an English-born American film, theatre and television actress. She is perhaps best known for the role of Karen Hayes on 24 as well as her Tony Award-nominated roles in The Rainmaker and Enchanted April...

       – The Skriker
      The Skriker
      The Skriker is a 1994 play by Caryl Churchill that tells the story of an ancient fairy who, during the course of the play, transforms into a plethora of objects and people as it pursues Lily and Josie, two teenage mothers whom it befriends, manipulates, seduces and entraps...

    • Frances Conroy
      Frances Conroy
      Frances Conroy is an American actress. She is best known for playing Ruth, the matriarch of the Fisher family, on Six Feet Under, which earned her a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award.-Early life:...

       – The Rehearsal
      The Rehearsal (play)
      The Rehearsal was a satirical play aimed specifically at John Dryden and generally at the sententious and overly ambitious theatre of the Restoration tragedy. The play was staged in 1671 and published anonymously in 1672, but it is certainly by George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham and others...

    • Shirley Knight
      Shirley Knight
      Shirley Enola Knight is an American stage, film and television actress. She has been nominated twice for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, in 1960 for The Dark at the Top of the Stairs and in 1962 for Sweet Bird of Youth....

       – The Young Man From Atlanta
      The Young Man From Atlanta
      The Young Man From Atlanta is a drama written by American dramatist, Horton Foote first produced Off Broadway by the Signature Theatre on 27 January 1995. Foote received the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the work...

    • Vanessa Redgrave
      Vanessa Redgrave
      Vanessa Redgrave, CBE is an English actress of stage, screen and television, as well as a political activist.She rose to prominence in 1961 playing Rosalind in As You Like It with the Royal Shakespeare Company and has since made more than 35 appearances on London's West End and Broadway, winning...

       – Antony and Cleopatra
      Antony and Cleopatra
      Antony and Cleopatra is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written sometime between 1603 and 1607. It was first printed in the First Folio of 1623. The plot is based on Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives and follows the relationship between Cleopatra and Mark Antony...

    • Lia Williams
      Lia Williams
      Lia Williams is an English actress and film director, notable for many stage, film, and television appearances. She is possibly best known for her role in the motion picture, Dirty Weekend...

       – Skylight
      Skylight (play)
      Skylight is a play by British dramatist David Hare. It opened at the Royal National Theatre, Cottesloe, directed by Richard Eyre, in 1995. The production then moved to the Wyndham's Theatre for a short run from 13 February 1996, after winning the Laurence Olivier Award for the 1995...

  • 1998: Cherry Jones
    Cherry Jones
    Cherry Jones is an American actress and recipient of the 2009 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress – Drama Series and the 2005 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play.-Career:...

     – Pride's Crossing
    Pride's Crossing
    Pride's Crossing is a play by Tina Howe. It received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play and was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Drama....

    • Edie Falco
      Edie Falco
      Edith "Edie" Falco is an American television, film and stage actress, known for her roles in Oz as Diane Wittlesey, as Carmela Soprano on the HBO series The Sopranos, and as the titular character on the Showtime series Nurse Jackie...

       – Side Man
      Side Man
      Side Man is a memory play by Warren Leight. His inspiration was his father Donald, who worked as a sideman, in jazz parlance a musician for hire who can blend in with the band or star as a solo performer, according to what is required by the gig.-Plot:...

    • Marie Mullen
      Marie Mullen
      Marie Mullen is an Irish actress.She was one of the founding members of the Druid Theatre Company and her husband has been associated with the company many times in the past...

       – The Beauty Queen of Leenane
      The Beauty Queen of Leenane
      The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a 1996 black comedy by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh which was premiered by the Druid Theatre Company in Galway, Ireland...

    • J. Smith-Cameron
      J. Smith-Cameron
      J. Smith-Cameron is an American actress.Smith-Cameron was born Jean Isabel Smith in Louisville, Kentucky, the daughter of architect Richard Sharpe Smith. She was raised in Greenville, South Carolina, and attended Florida State University where she was enrolled in the School of Theatre...

       – As Bees in Honey Drown
      As Bees In Honey Drown
      As Bees In Honey Drown is a satirical comedy by Douglas Carter Beane, an American playwright and screenwriter. The first showing of the play was in New York City in June, 1997. Four weeks later it moved to Lucille Lortel Theatre in the West Village, where it played for a year. It was also a...

    • Frances Sternhagen
      Frances Sternhagen
      Frances Hussey Sternhagen is an American actress. Sternhagen has appeared on and off Broadway, in movies, and on TV since the 1950s.-Personal life:...

       – Long Day's Journey Into Night
      Long Day's Journey Into Night
      Long Day's Journey Into Night is a 1956 drama in four acts written by American playwright Eugene O'Neill. The play is widely considered to be his masterwork...

  • 1999: Kathleen Chalfant
    Kathleen Chalfant
    -Life and career:Chalfant was born as in San Francisco, California and raised in her parents' boarding house in Oakland. Her father, William Bishop, was an officer in the Coast Guard...

     – Wit
    Wit (play)
    Wit is a play written by American playwright Margaret Edson. Edson used her work experience in a hospital as part of the inspiration for her play. Wit received its world premiere at South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa, California, in 1995...

    • Judi Dench
      Judi Dench
      Dame Judith Olivia "Judi" Dench, CH, DBE, FRSA is an English film, stage and television actress.Dench made her professional debut in 1957 with the Old Vic Company. Over the following few years she played in several of William Shakespeare's plays in such roles as Ophelia in Hamlet, Juliet in Romeo...

       – Amy's View
      Amy's View
      Amy's View was written by British playwright David Hare, and originally premiered in London at the Royal National Theatre's Lyttelton Theatre on June 13, 1997. It was directed by Richard Eyre and starred Judi Dench, Ronald Pickup and Samantha Bond in the title role. It was then performed on...

    • Lindsay Duncan
      Lindsay Duncan
      Lindsay Vere Duncan, CBE is a Scottish stage, television and film actress. On stage she won two Olivier Awards and a Tony Award for her performance in Les Liaisons dangereuses and Private Lives , and she starred in several plays by Harold Pinter. Her most famous roles on television include:...

       – Ashes to Ashes
      Ashes to Ashes (play)
      Ashes to Ashes is a 1996 play by English playwright Harold Pinter. It was first performed, in Dutch, by Toneelgroep Amsterdam, the Netherlands' largest repertory company, in Amsterdam, as part of its 1996–1997 season, and directed by Titus Muizelaar, who reprised his production, in Dutch with...

    • Elizabeth Franz
      Elizabeth Franz
      Elizabeth Franz is an American stage and television actress.-Life and career:Franz was born Betty Jean Frankovich in Akron, Ohio, the daughter of a factory worker....

       – Death of a Salesman
      Death of a Salesman
      Death of a Salesman is a 1949 play written by American playwright Arthur Miller. It was the recipient of the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Play. Premiered at the Morosco Theatre in February 1949, the original production ran for a total of 742 performances.-Plot :Willy Loman...

    • Swoosie Kurtz
      Swoosie Kurtz
      Swoosie Kurtz is an American actress. She began her career in theater during the 1970s and shortly thereafter began a career in television, garnering ten nominations and winning one Emmy Award. Her most famous television project was her role on the 1990s NBC drama Sisters...

       – The Mineola Twins
      The Mineola Twins
      The Mineola Twins is a play by Paula Vogel.The play opened on February 18, 1999 and closed on May 30, 1999 at the Laura Pels Theatre in a Roundabout Theatre production. Directed by Joe Mantello, the cast included Swoosie Kurtz and Mo Gaffney...

    • Zoë Wanamaker
      Zoe Wanamaker
      Zoë Wanamaker, CBE is an American-British actress. She has performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company; in films, including the Harry Potter series; and in a number of television productions, including a long-time role as Susan Harper in the sitcom My Family.-Early life and family:Wanamaker was...

       – Electra
      Electra (Sophocles)
      Electra or Elektra is a Greek tragedy by Sophocles. Its date is not known, but various stylistic similarities with the Philoctetes and the Oedipus at Colonus lead scholars to suppose that it was written towards the end of Sophocles' career.Set in the city of Argos a few years after the Trojan...



2000s

  • 2000: Eileen Heckart
    Eileen Heckart
    Eileen Heckart was an American actress of stage, screen, and television.-Early life:Heckart was born Anna Eileen Heckart in Columbus, Ohio, the daughter of Esther and Leo Herbert. She was legally adopted by her grandfather, J.W. Heckart. Her family was of Irish and German descent...

     – The Waverly Gallery
    • Sinéad Cusack
      Sinéad Cusack
      Sinéad Moira Cusack is an Irish stage, television and film actress. She has received two Tony Award nominations: once for Best Leading Actress in Much Ado About Nothing , and again for Best Featured Actress in Rock 'n' Roll .-Background:...

       – Our Lady of Sligo
    • Linda Lavin
      Linda Lavin
      Linda Lavin is an American singer and actress. She is best known for playing the title character in the sitcom Alice and for her Broadway performances.After acting as a child, Lavin joined the Compass Players in the late 1950s...

       – The Tale of the Allergist's Wife
    • Claudia Shear
      Claudia Shear
      Claudia Shear is an American actress and playwright.The Brooklyn-born Shear first came to prominence with her 1994 self-penned solo performance piece Blown Sideways Through Life, which enjoyed a run of 221 performances at the off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theatre and won her an Obie Award and a Drama...

       – Dirty Blonde
      Dirty Blonde (play)
      Dirty Blonde is a play by Claudia Shear.Conceived by Shear and James Lapine and featuring songs from I'm No Angel and She Done Him Wrong, it explores the phenomenon of the legendary Mae West, one of America's most enduring and controversial pop culture icons...

    • Lynn Thigpen – Jar the Floor
    • Charlyne Woodard – In the Blood
      Suzan-Lori Parks
      Suzan-Lori Parks is an African American playwright and screenwriter. She received the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant in 2001, and the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, Topdog/Underdog.-Early years:...

  • 2001: Mary-Louise Parker
    Mary-Louise Parker
    Mary-Louise Parker is an American actress, known for her current lead role on Showtime's television series Weeds portraying Nancy Botwin, for which she has received several nominations and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in 2006...

     – Proof
    Proof (play)
    Proof is a play by David Auburn originally produced by the Manhattan Theatre Club on 23 May 2000. It then went to Broadway on 24 October 2000 at the Walter Kerr Theatre, and was directed by Daniel J. Sullivan, with Mary-Louise Parker as Catherine, Larry Bryggman as Robert, Ben Shenkman as Hal, and...

    • Eileen Atkins
      Eileen Atkins
      Dame Eileen June Atkins, DBE is an English actress and occasional screenwriter.- Early life :Atkins was born in the Mothers' Hospital in Clapton, a Salvation Army women's hostel in East London...

       – The Unexpected Man
      The Unexpected Man
      The Unexpected Man is a play written in 1995 by Yasmina Reza. Reza is best known in the English speaking world as the author of Art.-Plot:...

    • Janie Dee
      Janie Dee
      Janie Dee is an English actress and singer.She is married to the actor Rupert Wickham.-Theatre:Dee is presently part of the Globe Theatre 2011 season playing The Countess of Roussillion in Shakespeare's "All's Well that Ends Well" and in October she goes to Nottingham Playhouse to play Amanda in ...

       – Comic Potential
    • Mary Beth Fisher – Boys Get Girl
    • Marian Seldes
      Marian Seldes
      Marian Hall Seldes is an American stage, film, radio, and television actress whose career has spanned six decades and who was elected to the American Theatre Hall of Fame.-Life and career:...

       – The Play About the Baby
      The Play About the Baby
      The Play About the Baby is a play by Edward Albee. It was first performed in 1998 by the Almeida Theatre Company in Malvern, Worcestershire, directed by Howard Davies. The American premiere was off-Broadway in 2001, by Alley Theatre at the Century Center for the Performing Arts, directed by David...

    • Lili Taylor
      Lili Taylor
      Lili Anne Taylor is an American actress notable for her appearances in such award-winning indie films as Mystic Pizza, Say Anything..., Short Cuts and I Shot Andy Warhol, and the acclaimed TV show Six Feet Under....

       – The Dead Eye Boy
  • 2002: Lindsay Duncan
    Lindsay Duncan
    Lindsay Vere Duncan, CBE is a Scottish stage, television and film actress. On stage she won two Olivier Awards and a Tony Award for her performance in Les Liaisons dangereuses and Private Lives , and she starred in several plays by Harold Pinter. Her most famous roles on television include:...

     – Private Lives
    Private Lives
    Private Lives is a 1930 comedy of manners in three acts by Noël Coward. It focuses on a divorced couple who discover that they are honeymooning with their new spouses in neighbouring rooms at the same hotel. Despite a perpetually stormy relationship, they realise that they still have feelings for...

    • Robin Bartlett
      Robin Bartlett
      Robin Bartlett is an American actress who grew up in Switzerland.She was formerly married to the actor Alan Rosenberg....

       – Everett Beekin
    • Anna Paquin
      Anna Paquin
      Anna Helene Paquin is a Canadian-born New Zealand actress. Paquin's first critically successful film was The Piano, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1994 at the age of 11 – the second youngest winner in history...

       – The Glory of Living
      The Glory of Living
      The Glory of Living is a 1998 play by Rebecca Gilman. The play received its first production at the Circle Theater in Forest Park, Illinois. The play has won many awards and was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.-Plot:...

    • Sarah Jessica Parker
      Sarah Jessica Parker
      Sarah Jessica Parker is an American film, television, and theater actress and producer.She is best known for her leading role as Carrie Bradshaw on the HBO television series Sex and the City , for which she won four Golden Globe Awards, three Screen Actors Guild Awards, and two Emmy Awards...

       – Wonder of the World
      Wonder of the World (play)
      Wonder of the World is a play by American playwright David Lindsay-Abaire. This play was his second success as a playwright, the first play being Fuddy Meers which also premiered at the Manhattan Theatre Club...

    • Mercedes Ruehl
      Mercedes Ruehl
      Mercedes J. Ruehl is an American theater, television and film actor.-Personal life:Ruehl was born in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York City, the daughter of Mercedes J., a school teacher, and Vincent Ruehl, an FBI agent. She was raised Catholic. Her father was of German and Irish descent and her...

       – The Goat
    • Meryl Streep
      Meryl Streep
      Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep is an American actress who has worked in theatre, television and film.Streep made her professional stage debut in 1971's The Playboy of Seville, before her screen debut in the television movie The Deadliest Season in 1977. In that same year, she made her film debut with...

       – The Seagull
      The Seagull
      The Seagull is the first of what are generally considered to be the four major plays by the Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov. The Seagull was written in 1895 and first produced in 1896...

  • 2003: Vanessa Redgrave
    Vanessa Redgrave
    Vanessa Redgrave, CBE is an English actress of stage, screen and television, as well as a political activist.She rose to prominence in 1961 playing Rosalind in As You Like It with the Royal Shakespeare Company and has since made more than 35 appearances on London's West End and Broadway, winning...

     – Long Day's Journey Into Night
    Long Day's Journey Into Night
    Long Day's Journey Into Night is a 1956 drama in four acts written by American playwright Eugene O'Neill. The play is widely considered to be his masterwork...

    • Jayne Atkinson
      Jayne Atkinson
      Jayne Atkinson is an English-born American film, theatre and television actress. She is perhaps best known for the role of Karen Hayes on 24 as well as her Tony Award-nominated roles in The Rainmaker and Enchanted April...

       – Enchanted April
      Enchanted April
      Enchanted April is the second film adaptation Elizabeth von Arnim's 1922 novel, The Enchanted April. The novel was adapted as a Broadway play in 1925, and as an RKO Radio film in 1935 - both using the same title as the novel. The 1992 film release received several Golden Globe and Academy Award...

    • Marylouise Burke
      Marylouise Burke
      Marylouise Burke is an American film, TV and theatre actress.Burke won the 2000 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play for her appearance as Gertie in an off-Broadway-theatre production of Fuddy Meers in New York City, New York....

       – Kimberly Akimbo
      Kimberly Akimbo
      Kimberly Akimbo is a play written in 2000 by Pulitzer prize-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire. Its title character is a lonely teenage girl suffering from a disease a lot like progeria, that causes her to age 4 and a half times as fast as normal. Thus, Kimberly is trapped inside the frail...

    • Claire Higgins – Vincent in Brixton
      Vincent in Brixton
      Vincent in Brixton is a 2003 play by Nicholas Wright. The play premiered at London's National Theatre. It transferred to the Playhouse Theatre and later to Broadway....

    • Dael Orlandersmith
      Dael Orlandersmith
      Dael Orlandersmith is an actress, poet and playwright who is best known for her Obie Award winning Beauty's Daughter and the 2002 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Drama, Yellowman....

       – Yellowman
      Yellowman (play)
      Yellowman is a play written by Dael Orlandersmith. It was the 2002 Pulitzer Prize finalist for drama.-Plot summary:Divided into five parts, the play details the relationship between Eugene, a very fair skinned black man, and Alma, a large dark skinned woman. Their story begins in their youth on the...

    • Fiona Shaw
      Fiona Shaw
      Fiona Shaw, CBE is an Irish actress and theatre director. Although to international audiences she is probably most familiar for her minor role as Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter films, she is an accomplished classical actress...

       – Medea
      Medea (play)
      Medea is an ancient Greek tragedy written by Euripides, based upon the myth of Jason and Medea and first produced in 431 BC. The plot centers on the barbarian protagonist as she finds her position in the Greek world threatened, and the revenge she takes against her husband Jason who has betrayed...

  • 2004: Viola Davis
    Viola Davis
    Viola Davis is an American actress.Known primarily as a stage actress, Davis won a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play and a Drama Desk Award for her role in King Hedley II . She won a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play for her role in the...

     – Intimate Apparel
    Intimate Apparel
    Intimate Apparel is a play written by Lynn Nottage. The play is a co-production and co-commission between Center Stage, Baltimore, Maryland, and South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa, California....

    / Phylicia Rashad
    Phylicia Rashad
    Phylicia Rashād is an American Tony Award winning actress and singer, best known for her role as Clair Huxtable on the long-running NBC sitcom The Cosby Show....

     – A Raisin in the Sun
    A Raisin in the Sun
    A Raisin in the Sun is a play by Lorraine Hansberry that debuted on Broadway in 1959. The title comes from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes...

    • Eileen Atkins
      Eileen Atkins
      Dame Eileen June Atkins, DBE is an English actress and occasional screenwriter.- Early life :Atkins was born in the Mothers' Hospital in Clapton, a Salvation Army women's hostel in East London...

       – The Retreat from Moscow
      The Retreat from Moscow
      The Retreat from Moscow is a play written by William Nicholson.The play is about the end of a three-decade marriage and the subsequent emotional fallout. The title is taken from Napoleon's costly invasion of Moscow and the subsequent retreat. It was first performed at the Chichester Festival...

    • Shannon Cochran
      Shannon Cochran
      Shannon Cochran is an American actress. While she has numerous credits to her name, she is particularly recognizable as having played the mysterious Anna Morgan in the popular 2002 film The Ring....

       – Bug
      Bug (play)
      Bug is a play by American playwright Tracy Letts. It was adapted into a film in 2006.- Synopsis :Most of the play takes place in a seedy motel room. Lonely cocktail waitress Agnes lives there, hiding from her violent ex-con ex-husband Jerry Goss. One night, her lesbian biker friend R.C. introduces...

    • Lizan Mitchell – Trojan Women
    • Jeanie Smith Cameron – Sarah, Sarah

  • 2005: Cherry Jones
    Cherry Jones
    Cherry Jones is an American actress and recipient of the 2009 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress – Drama Series and the 2005 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play.-Career:...

     – Doubt: A Parable
    • Veanne Cox
      Veanne Cox
      Veanne Cox is an American stage and screen actress and former ballet dancer.Cox was born in Norfolk, Virginia. She studied ballet at the Washington School of Ballet, acting at the Studio Theatre's Conservatory in Washington, D.C., and voice at Catholic University.Her Broadway debut was in the...

       – Last Easter
    • Judy Kaye
      Judy Kaye
      Judy Kaye is an American singer and actress. She has appeared in stage musicals, plays, and operas. Kaye has been in long runs on Broadway in the musicals The Phantom of the Opera, Ragtime and Mamma Mia!-Biography:...

       – Souvenir
      Souvenir (play)
      Souvenir is a two-character play, with incidental music, by Stephen Temperley.Set in a Greenwich Village supper club in 1964, it flashes back to the musical career of Florence Foster Jenkins, a wealthy socialite with a famously uncertain sense of pitch and key. In 1932, she met mediocre pianist...

    • Laura Linney
      Laura Linney
      Laura Leggett Linney is an American actress of film, television, and theatre. Linney has won three Emmy Awards, two Golden Globes, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. She has been nominated for three times for an Academy Award and once for a BAFTA Award...

       – Sight Unseen
      Sight Unseen (play)
      Sight Unseen is a play by Donald Margulies. At its center is Jonathan Waxman, a Brooklyn Jew who has become a very wealthy critically acclaimed artist. Happily married, with a baby on the way, he travels to London for a retrospective of his work...

    • Frances Sternhagen
      Frances Sternhagen
      Frances Hussey Sternhagen is an American actress. Sternhagen has appeared on and off Broadway, in movies, and on TV since the 1950s.-Personal life:...

       – Echoes of the War
    • Kathleen Turner
      Kathleen Turner
      Mary Kathleen Turner is an American actress. She came to fame during the 1980s, after roles in the Hollywood films Body Heat, Peggy Sue Got Married, Romancing the Stone, The War of the Roses, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Prizzi's Honor...

       – Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
  • 2006: Lois Smith
    Lois Smith
    Lois Smith is an American actress whose career in theater, film, and television has spanned five decades.Smith was born Lois Arlene Humbert in Topeka, Kansas, the daughter of Carrie Davis and William Oren Humbert, who was a telephone company employee...

     – The Trip to Bountiful
    The Trip to Bountiful
    The Trip to Bountiful is a 1985 film starring Geraldine Page, John Heard, Carlin Glynn, Richard Bradford and Rebecca De Mornay. Geraldine Page won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as Carrie Watts. The movie was adapted by Horton Foote from his television play. The Trip to...

    • Margaret Colin
      Margaret Colin
      Margaret Colin is an American actress. She is known for her role as Margo Montgomery Hughes # 1 on As the World Turns and for her role as Eleanor Waldorf-Rose on Gossip Girl.-Early life:...

       – Defiance
      Defiance (play)
      Defiance is a 2005 play by American playwright John Patrick Shanley. The play concerns a colonel who promotes a black officer solely based on race...

    • Cherry Jones
      Cherry Jones
      Cherry Jones is an American actress and recipient of the 2009 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress – Drama Series and the 2005 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play.-Career:...

       – Faith Healer
      Faith Healer
      Faith Healer is a play by Brian Friel about the life of faith healer Francis Hardy as monologued through the shifting memories of Hardy, his wife, Grace, and stage manager, Teddy.-Synopsis:...

    • Jennifer Jason Leigh
      Jennifer Jason Leigh
      Jennifer Jason Leigh is an American film and stage actress, best known for her roles in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Single White Female, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Georgia and Short Cuts...

       – Abigail's Party
      Abigail's Party
      Abigail's Party is a play for stage and television written and directed in 1977 by Mike Leigh. It is a suburban situation comedy of manners, and a satire on the aspirations and tastes of the new middle class that emerged in Britain in the 1970s...

    • Jan Maxwell
      Jan Maxwell
      Jan Maxwell is an American stage and television actress. She is a four-time Tony Award nominee.-Biography:She is the daughter of former First District Judge Ralph B. Maxwell and Elizabeth Maxwell, a lawyer for the EPA. She attended West Fargo High School, West Fargo, North Dakota and Moorhead...

       – Entertaining Mr. Sloane
    • Julie White
      Julie White
      Julie White is an American actress. She is known for her role in Grace Under Fire and for her role as Judy Witwicky in the Transformers film series.-Personal life:...

       – The Little Dog Laughed
  • 2007: Eve Best
    Eve Best
    Eve Best is an English actress, best known for her roles as Dr. O'Hara in the Showtime television series Nurse Jackie, as Wallis Simpson in the 2010 film The King's Speech, and Dolley Madison in the 2011 American Experience television special about that First Lady.-Early life and education:Best...

     – A Moon for the Misbegotten
    A Moon for the Misbegotten
    A Moon for the Misbegotten is a play by Eugene O'Neill. The play can be thought of as a sequel to the autobiographical Long Day's Journey into Night...

    • Orlagh Cassidy
      Orlagh Cassidy
      Orlagh Cassidy is an American actress. She attended the acting conservatory at the State University of New York at Purchase...

       – The Field
      The Field
      The Field is a play written by John B. Keane, first performed in 1965. It tells the story of the hardened farmer "Bull" McCabe and his love for the land he rents. The play debuted at Dublin's Olympia Theatre in 1965, with Ray McAnally as "The Bull" and Eamon Keane as "The Bird" O'Donnell. The play...

    • Blythe Danner
      Blythe Danner
      Blythe Katherine Danner is an American actress. She is the mother of actress Gwyneth Paltrow and director Jake Paltrow.-Early life:...

       – Suddenly Last Summer
    • Jennifer Mudge – Dutchman
      Dutchman (play)
      Dutchman is a play written by African-American playwright Amiri Baraka. It played at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village, New York in March 1964 and won an Obie Award. Made into a film in 1967, Dutchman was the last play produced by Baraka under his birth name, LeRoi Jones...

    • Sandra Oh
      Sandra Oh
      Sandra Oh is a Canadian actress. She is best known for the role of Dr. Cristina Yang on ABC's Grey's Anatomy, for which she has won a Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild award. She also played notable roles in the feature films Under the Tuscan Sun and Sideways, and had a supporting role on the...

       – Satellites
    • Annie Parisse
      Annie Parisse
      Anne Marie Cancelmi , known as Annie Parisse, is an American television, film, and theater actress, known for playing Alexandra Borgia on the television drama Law & Order, a role she played from 2005 until 2006 in 33 episodes. Parisse is also known for her role of Julia Lindsey Snyder on the...

       – The Internationalist
    • Meryl Streep
      Meryl Streep
      Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep is an American actress who has worked in theatre, television and film.Streep made her professional stage debut in 1971's The Playboy of Seville, before her screen debut in the television movie The Deadliest Season in 1977. In that same year, she made her film debut with...

       – Mother Courage and Her Children
      Mother Courage and Her Children
      Mother Courage and Her Children is a play written in 1939 by the German dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht with significant contributions from Margarete Steffin...

  • 2008: Deanna Dunagan
    Deanna Dunagan
    Deanna Dunagan is a Chicago based American actress. Although Dunagan has appeared on television and in films, she is most admired for her work as a stage actress. She is best known for her Tony Award-winning portrayal of Violet Weston in Tracy Letts' August: Osage County.-Early life and...

     – August: Osage County
    August: Osage County
    August: Osage County is a darkly comedic play by Tracy Letts. It was the recipient of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play premiered at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago on 28 June 2007, and closed on 26 August 2007. Its Broadway debut was at the Imperial Theater on 4 December 2007 and...

    • Sinéad Cusack
      Sinéad Cusack
      Sinéad Moira Cusack is an Irish stage, television and film actress. She has received two Tony Award nominations: once for Best Leading Actress in Much Ado About Nothing , and again for Best Featured Actress in Rock 'n' Roll .-Background:...

       – Rock ’n’ Roll
      Rock 'n' Roll (play)
      Rock 'n' Roll is a play by British playwright Tom Stoppard that premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 2006.-Plot summary:The play is concerned with the significance of rock and roll in the emergence of the socialist movement in Eastern Bloc Czechoslovakia between the Prague Spring of...

    • Frances McDormand
      Frances McDormand
      Frances Louise McDormand is an American film and stage actress. She has starred in a number of films, including her Academy Award-winning performance as Marge Gunderson in Fargo, in 1996...

       – The Country Girl
    • Amy Morton
      Amy Morton
      Amy Morton is an American actress best known for her work in theatre. A member of Steppenwolf Theater's core group of actors since 1997, Morton has spent most of her career working in the Chicago theater scene. She made her Broadway debut starring opposite Gary Sinise as Nurse Ratched in the Tony...

       – August: Osage County
      August: Osage County
      August: Osage County is a darkly comedic play by Tracy Letts. It was the recipient of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play premiered at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago on 28 June 2007, and closed on 26 August 2007. Its Broadway debut was at the Imperial Theater on 4 December 2007 and...

    • Fiona Shaw
      Fiona Shaw
      Fiona Shaw, CBE is an Irish actress and theatre director. Although to international audiences she is probably most familiar for her minor role as Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter films, she is an accomplished classical actress...

       – Happy Days
      Happy Days (play)
      Happy Days is a play in two acts, written in English, by Samuel Beckett. He began the play on 8 October 1960 and it was completed on 14 May 1961. Beckett finished the translation into French by November 1962 but amended the title...

    • Julie White
      Julie White
      Julie White is an American actress. She is known for her role in Grace Under Fire and for her role as Judy Witwicky in the Transformers film series.-Personal life:...

       – From Up Here
  • 2009: Janet McTeer
    Janet McTeer
    Janet McTeer, OBE is a British actress.-Life and career:McTeer was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, United Kingdom, the daughter of Jean and Alan McTeer...

     – Mary Stuart
    • Saidah Arrika Ekulona – Ruined
      Ruined (play)
      Ruined is a play by Lynn Nottage. The play won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.The play involves the plight of women in the civil war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo.-Production history:...

    • Jane Fonda
      Jane Fonda
      Jane Fonda is an American actress, writer, political activist, former fashion model, and fitness guru. She rose to fame in the 1960s with films such as Barbarella and Cat Ballou. She has won two Academy Awards and received several other movie awards and nominations during more than 50 years as an...

       – 33 Variations
      33 Variations
      33 Variations is a play by Moisés Kaufman, inspired by Ludwig van Beethoven's eponymous work. It débuted on Broadway on March 9, 2009, starring Jane Fonda...

    • Marcia Gay Harden
      Marcia Gay Harden
      Marcia Gay Harden is an American film and theatre actress. Harden's breakthrough role was in Miller's Crossing and then The First Wives Club which was followed by several roles which gained her wider fame including the hit comedy Flubber and Meet Joe Black...

       – God of Carnage
      God of Carnage
      God of Carnage is a play by Yasmina Reza. It is about two pairs of parents, one of whose child has hurt the other at a public park, who meet to discuss the matter in a civilized manner. However, as the evening goes on, the parents become increasingly childish, resulting in the evening devolving...

    • Elizabeth Marvel
      Elizabeth Marvel
      -Biography:Marvel was born in Mohnton, Pennsylvania. She studied at Juilliard. She has several credits on Broadway and in film and television. Marvel was a series regular on The District, and has appeared in two films by the Coen Brothers: True Grit as the adult Mattie Ross, and Burn After Reading...

       – Fifty Words
    • Jan Maxwell
      Jan Maxwell
      Jan Maxwell is an American stage and television actress. She is a four-time Tony Award nominee.-Biography:She is the daughter of former First District Judge Ralph B. Maxwell and Elizabeth Maxwell, a lawyer for the EPA. She attended West Fargo High School, West Fargo, North Dakota and Moorhead...

       – Scenes From an Execution


2010s

  • 2010: Jan Maxwell
    Jan Maxwell
    Jan Maxwell is an American stage and television actress. She is a four-time Tony Award nominee.-Biography:She is the daughter of former First District Judge Ralph B. Maxwell and Elizabeth Maxwell, a lawyer for the EPA. She attended West Fargo High School, West Fargo, North Dakota and Moorhead...

     – The Royal Family
    • Ayesha Antoine
      Ayesha Antoine
      Ayesha Antoine is an English actress. She is known for portraying Rachel Baptiste in Holby City, and Poppy Silver in Grange Hill.-Background:...

       – My Wonderful Day
      My Wonderful Day
      My Wonderful Day is a 2009 play by Alan Ayckbourn. It is about a nine-year-old girl, Winnie, who has an essay to write about her day, and records the shenanigans of grown-ups around her....

    • Melissa Errico
      Melissa Errico
      -Biography:Born in Manhattan, Errico moved to Manhasset on Long Island at an early age. Her parents, a sculptor and a physician/concert pianist, supported her early interest in ballet, and gymnastics, and Melissa competed nationally as a gymnast...

       – Candida
      Candida (play)
      Candida, a comedy by playwright George Bernard Shaw, was first published in 1898, as part of his Plays Pleasant. The central characters are clergyman James Morell, his wife Candida and a youthful poet, Eugene Marchbanks, who tries to win Candida's affections. The play questions Victorian notions...

    • Anne Hathaway
      Anne Hathaway (actress)
      Anne Jacqueline Hathaway is an American actress. After several stage roles, she appeared in the 1999 television series Get Real. She played Mia Thermopolis in The Princess Diaries...

       – Twelfth Night
    • Kristen Johnston
      Kristen Johnston
      Kristen Johnston is an American stage, film, and television actress. She may be most famous for her role as Sally Solomon in the television series 3rd Rock from the Sun...

       – So Help Me God!
    • Laura Linney
      Laura Linney
      Laura Leggett Linney is an American actress of film, television, and theatre. Linney has won three Emmy Awards, two Golden Globes, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. She has been nominated for three times for an Academy Award and once for a BAFTA Award...

       – Time Stands Still
      Time Stands Still (play)
      Time Stands Still is a play written by the Pulitzer Prize winner Donald Margulies and directed by Tony Award winner Daniel Sullivan about changing relationships and developing social issues...


  • 2011: Frances McDormand
    Frances McDormand
    Frances Louise McDormand is an American film and stage actress. She has starred in a number of films, including her Academy Award-winning performance as Marge Gunderson in Fargo, in 1996...

     – Good People
    Good People (play)
    Good People is a 2011 play by David Lindsay-Abaire. The world premiere was staged by the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York City. The production was nominated for two 2011 Tony Awards – Best Play and Best Leading Actress in a Play , with the latter winning.- Synopsis :Margie Walsh, a resident of...

    • Nina Arianda
      Nina Arianda
      Nina Arianda is an American theatre and film actress.-Early life and education:Arianda grew up in Clifton, New Jersey and Heidelberg, Germany...

       – Born Yesterday
      Born Yesterday
      Born Yesterday is a play written by Garson Kanin which premiered on Broadway in 1946, starring Judy Holliday as Billie Dawn. The play was adapted intoa successful 1950 film of the same name.- Plot :...

    • Stockard Channing
      Stockard Channing
      Stockard Channing is an American stage, film and television actress. She is known for her portrayal of First Lady Abbey Bartlet in the NBC television series The West Wing; for playing Betty Rizzo in the film Grease; and for her role as Ouisa Kittredge in the play Six Degrees of Separation and its...

       – Other Desert Cities
    • Laurie Metcalf
      Laurie Metcalf
      Lauren Elizabeth "Laurie" Metcalf is an American actress. She is widely known for her performance as Jackie Harris on the ABC sitcom Roseanne, Mary Cooper on The Big Bang Theory, the voice of Mrs. Davis in the Toy Story film series and as Debbie Salt in Scream 2...

       – The Other Place
    • Michele Pawk
      Michele Pawk
      Michele Pawk is an American actress and singer.-Biography:Born in Butler, Pennsylvania, Pawk attended Allegheny College and the College Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati, after which she spent a year working in a musical revue at Disney World...

       – A Small Fire
    • Lily Rabe
      Lily Rabe
      Lily Rabe is an American actress. She is the daughter of the late actress Jill Clayburgh and playwright David Rabe and attended Northwestern University and the Hotchkiss School....

       – The Merchant of Venice
      The Merchant of Venice
      The Merchant of Venice is a tragic comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1596 and 1598. Though classified as a comedy in the First Folio and sharing certain aspects with Shakespeare's other romantic comedies, the play is perhaps most remembered for its dramatic...


See also

  • Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress
  • Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play
    Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play
    This is a list of the winners and nominations of Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. The award has been presented since 1947, and is for performance in new productions or revivals.-1940s:...


External links

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