Mary-Louise Parker | Biography, Movies, & Facts | Britannica (original) (raw)
Mary-Louise Parker (born August 2, 1964, Fort Jackson, South Carolina, U.S.) is an American actress of stage, screen, and television who is noted for bringing integrity and depth to her performances.
Parker grew up in South Carolina and studied acting at the North Carolina School of the Arts. In 1975 she had a small part in the soap opera Ryan’s Hope, but it was not until the late 1980s that she began to garner notice, with her work in Off-Broadway productions. In 1989 she appeared in her first film, Signs of Life, a drama in which she portrayed an abused girlfriend. This and later roles led some to describe her as the “long-suffering girl next door.” In 1990 Parker made her Broadway debut in Prelude to a Kiss, and her performance as Rita—a young bartender whose soul moves into the body of an old man, to the dismay of her new husband (played by Timothy Hutton)—earned her a Tony Award nomination. That year Parker was also on-screen in one of the first movies to openly discuss the AIDS epidemic, Longtime Companion. She next won critical praise in the film Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) as the strong-willed café owner Ruth, who struggles through an abusive marriage.
Parker went on to appear in a number of major Hollywood films, including The Client (1994), a thriller that starred Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones; Woody Allen’s comedy Bullets over Broadway (1994); Boys on the Side (1995), in which she played an AIDS victim; and The Portrait of a Lady (1996), an adaptation of the Henry James novel that also featured Nicole Kidman and John Malkovich. In 1996 Parker starred on Broadway with Billy Crudup in a revival of William Inge’s play Bus Stop. (Parker and Crudup became romantically involved but broke up before their son was born in 2004.) Parker again earned praise for her performance in the stage drama How I Learned to Drive (1997), which followed the relationship between Parker’s character, the insecure Li’l Bit, and the sexually abusive Uncle Peck (played by David Morse).
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In 2001 Parker won a Tony Award for her performance as the brilliant and potentially insane Katherine in David Auburn’s play Proof. That year Parker also first appeared on the hit television drama The West Wing, as the women’s rights activist Amy Gardner; turning a one-episode role into a recurring character, she earned an Emmy Award nomination in 2002. She continued to earn accolades as the dreamy and desperate Harper Pitt in the 2003 HBO adaptation of Tony Kushner’s six-hour play Angels in America. Parker convincingly portrayed Harper’s anguish as a Mormon housewife struggling with her marriage to a closeted gay man and her Valium addiction, and she won an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award. During this time, Parker also appeared in such films as Red Dragon (2002), a prequel to the 1991 thriller Silence of the Lambs; the teen comedy Saved! (2004); and the musical Romance & Cigarettes (2005). In addition, she earned a Tony nomination for her work in the play Reckless (2004), a dark comedy about a woman on the run after her husband hires a hit man to kill her.
In 2005 the TV show Weeds premiered on the cable network Showtime, with Parker in the lead role as Nancy Botwin, a widowed mother who starts dealing marijuana in the California suburbs to provide for her family. Critics applauded the show’s ability to flit between clichés of suburbia, stoner humor, and the pain of a family in mourning. Parker’s portrayal of the reckless soccer mom won her a Golden Globe Award (2006) before the show ended in 2012.
While continuing to film Weeds, Parker appeared in such movies as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), in which she played the wife of Jesse James (Brad Pitt); the children’s adventure film The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008); Howl (2010), a dramatization of the poet Allen Ginsberg’s landmark censorship trial; and the action comedy RED (2010). In 2013 she turned up in the sequel RED 2 and the supernatural action caper R.I.P.D. Her later notable film credits included the spy thriller Red Sparrow (2018).
During this time, Parker continued to appear on television, with recurring roles in such series as The Blacklist, Billions, and Mr. Mercedes. She also was cast in the miniseries When We Rise (2017), about the Stonewall riots. In addition, Parker occasionally appeared on the stage, notably starring in the Broadway production of The Sound Inside (2019–20), a mystery centering on a creative-writing professor. For her performance, Parker won her second Tony Award. In 2022 she reunited with Morse for the Broadway production of How I Learned to Drive; the two actors reprised the roles they had played 25 years earlier, and both received Tony nominations.
Parker wrote the volume Dear Mr. You (2015), a compilation of letters to the men she had encountered, from family members to strangers.