Marcia Gay Harden Biography
Marcia Gay Harden is an American actress who made her film breakthrough in the 1990 Coen brothers-directed Miller’s Crossing. Gay followed this with roles in films including Used People (1992), The First Wives Club (1996), and Flubber (1997).
She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as artist Lee Krasner in the 2000 film Pollock.
Gay earned another Academy Award nomination for her performance as Celeste Boyle in Mystic River (2003). She has also had other notable film roles such as American Gun (2005), and 2007’s The Mist and Into the Wild.
She made her broadway debut in 1993 where she starred in Angels in America, she was then nominated for a Tony Award. Gay then returned to Broadway in 2009 as Veronica in God of Carnage. Her performance then won her the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.
She was nominated for her second Primetime Emmy Award for her performance in the 2009 television film The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler. Her other notable television roles include Dr Leanne Rorish in the CBS medical drama Code Black and also attorney Rebecca Halliday in the HBO Aaron Sorkin series The Newsroom.
Marcia Gay Harden Education
She graduated from Surrattsville High School in Clinton, Maryland in 1976. She then received a BA in theatre from the University of Texas at Austin in 1980. She then received a Master of Fine Arts from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Marcia Gay Harden Age
How Old Is Marcia Gay Harden? Marcia Gay Harden was born on August 14, 1959 in La Jolla, California, U.S. She is 59 years old as of 2018.
Marcia Gay Harden Family
She was born to Texas natives Beverly Harden (née Bushfield), a housewife, and Thad Harold Harden (1932–2002). His Father was an officer in the United States Navy.
She was born in a family of five children, threee sisters and a brother. Her brother is named Thaddeus as is of her former husband. Her family frequently moved because of her father’s job, living in Japan, Germany, Greece, California, and Maryland.
Marcia Gay Harden Husband | Marcia Gay Harden Dating
She married a prop master, Thaddaeus Scheel with whom she worked on The Spitfire Grill in 1996. She filed for divorce from Scheel in February 2012.
Marcia Gay Harden Children
Scheel and Harden have three children a daughter, Eulala Grace Scheel (born September 1998), and twins Julitta Dee Scheel and Hudson Scheel Harden (born April 22, 2004).
Marcia Gay Harden Career
She has owned a property in the Catskills and a townhouse in Harlem. She later sold the Harlem house in 2012.
She is an avid potter learning it in high school and then took it up again while acting in Angels in America.
Her first film role was in a 1979 student-produced movie at the University of Texas. Harden appeared in several television programs, including Simon & Simon, Kojak, and CBS Summer Playhouse throughout the 1980s. She also appeared in The Imagemaker (1986), her first movie screen role, in which she played a stage manager. Harden appeared in the Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing (1990)which is a 1930s mobster drama in which she first gained wide exposure. Even so, at the time, living in New York City, Harden had to go back to doing catering jobs “because I didn’t have any money”.
She played actress Ava Gardner alongside Philip Casnoff as Frank Sinatra in the made for TV miniseries Sinatra in 1992. Throughout the 1990s, Harden continued to appear in films and television. Her notable film roles include the Disney sci-fi comedy Flubber (1997) which is a popular hit in which she co-starred with Robin Williams; the supernatural drama Meet Joe Black (1998), playing the under-appreciated daughter of a tycoon (Anthony Hopkins, co-starring Brad Pitt) She has also cast in Labor of Love (1998), a Lifetime television movie in which she starred with David Marshall Grant and also Space Cowboys (2000), an all-star adventure-drama about aging astronauts.
She was awarded the 2000 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of painter Lee Krasner in Pollock (2000). Harden was again nominated in the same category for Mystic River in 2003.
She guest-starred as FBI undercover agent Dana Lewis posing as a white-supremacist in “Raw” which is an episode of the popular crime drama Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. This role earned her her first Emmy Award nomination for best guest actress in a drama series in 2007. She then reprised the role in the series’ eighth-season premiere and also again in the twelfth-season episode “Penetration” as a rape victim (aired November 10, 2010).
Gay appeared in several films, including Sean Penn’s Into the Wild and Frank Darabont’s The Mist (opposite Thomas Jane and Laurie Holden), based on the novella by Stephen King in 2007. Also the same year, Harden shared top billing with Kevin Bacon in Rails & Ties which is the directorial debut of Alison Eastwood. Gay appeared in Home playing a woman who has had a mastectomy in 2008. In the film Home, Harden’s co-stars include her daughter, Eulala Scheel. She starred in the Christmas Cottage, a story of the early artistic beginnings of the Painter of Light, Thomas Kinkade.
Harden appeared as a regular on the FX series Damages as a shrewd corporate attorney opposite Glenn Close and William Hurt in 2009. She received a 2009 Emmy nomination for her role in The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendle which is a TV film also starring Oscar-winner Anna Paquin. Harden was a Best Supporting Actress in a TV Movie/Miniseries nominee and lost to Shohreh Aghdashloo. She would have entered the elite group of “triple-crown” actors if she won this Emmy ; those who have won the profession’s three highest honors: the Academy Award (film), the Tony Award (stage), and the Emmy Award (television).
She co-starred with Ellen Page and Drew Barrymore in Whip It, which proved a critical success in 2009. She also played in the comedy The Maiden Heist (2009) with Christopher Walken and Morgan Freeman.
Gay reunited with her former Broadway co-star Jeff Daniels as a new cast member on HBO’s series The Newsroom in 2013. From 2015 to 2018, She played Christian Grey’s mother, Grace Trevelyan Grey, in the Fifty Shades film series from 2015 to 2018. She also began a starring role in the TV series Code Black in 2015.
She debuted on Broadway in the role of Harper Pitt (and others) in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America in 1993. This role earned her critical acclaim and also she received a Tony Award nomination (Best Featured Actress in a Play). Debra Monk was the winner in that category.
Gay returned to Broadway in Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage, where she co-starred with James Gandolfini, Hope Davis, and Jeff Daniels in 2009. All the three actors were then nominated for the Tony Award, and on June 8, Gay won Best Actress in a Play.
Marcia Gay Harden Hot | Marcia Gay Harden Feet | Marcia Gay Harden Pictures
Marcia Gay Harden Movies and TV Shows
Marcia Gay Harden Movies
| Year | Title | Role |
| 2018 | Fifty Shades Freed | Grace Trevelyan Grey |
| 2017 | Fifty Shades Darker | Grace Trevelyan Grey |
| 2016 | Get a Job | Katherine Dunn |
| 2015 | Grandma | Judy |
| Fifty Shades of Grey | Grace Trevelyan Grey | |
| Larry Gaye: Renegade Male Flight Attendant | President of the FAFAFA | |
| After Words | Jane Taylor | |
| 2014 | Magic in the Moonlight | Mrs. Baker |
| You’re Not You | Elizabeth | |
| Elsa & Fred | Lydia Barcroft | |
| Unity | Narrator | |
| 2013 | The Wine of Summer | Shelley |
| Parkland | Head Nurse Doris Nelson | |
| 2012 | Noah’s Ark: The New Beginning | Aamah |
| If I Were You | Madelyn | |
| 2011 | Detachment | Principal Carol Dearden |
| Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You | Marjorie Dunfour | |
| 2010 | A Cat in Paris | Jeanne |
| True Grit | Mattie Ross | |
| 2009 | The Maiden Heist | Rose |
| Whip It | Brooke Cavendar | |
| 2008 | Home | Inga |
| Thomas Kinkade’s Home for Christmas | Maryanne Kinkade | |
| 2007 | The Invisible | Diane Powell |
| Into the Wild | Billie McCandless | |
| Rails & Ties | Megan Stark | |
| The Mist | Mrs. Carmody | |
| 2006 | American Dreamz | First Lady |
| The Dead Girl[20] | Melora | |
| The Hoax | Edith Irving | |
| Canvas | Mary Marino | |
| 2005 | Bad News Bears | Liz Whitewood |
| Willa Cather: The Road Is All | Willa Cather | |
| American Gun | Janet Huttenson | |
| 2004 | Welcome to Mooseport | Grace Sutherland |
| P.S. | Missy Goldberg | |
| 2003 | Mystic River | Celeste Boyle |
| Casa de los Babys | Nan | |
| Mona Lisa Smile | Nancy Abbey | |
| 2001 | Gaudi Afternoon | Frankie Stevens |
| 2000 | Space Cowboys | Sara Holland |
| Pollock | Lee Krasner | |
| 1998 | Desperate Measures | Dr. Samantha Hawkins |
| Meet Joe Black | Allison Parrish | |
| Curtain Call | Michelle Tippet | |
| 1997 | Flubber | Dr. Sara Jean Reynolds |
| 1996 | The Spitfire Grill | Shelby Goddard |
| The Daytrippers | Libby | |
| The First Wives Club | Dr. Leslie Rosen | |
| Spy Hard | Miss Cheevus | |
| 1994 | Safe Passage | Cynthia |
| 1992 | Crush | Lane |
| Used People | Norma | |
| 1991 | Late for Dinner | Joy Husband |
| 1990 | Miller’s Crossing | Verna Bernbaum |
| TBA | Point Blank |
Marcia Gay Harden TV Shows
| Year | Title | Role |
| 2015, 2017 | How to Get Away with Murder | Hannah Keating |
| 2015–18 | Code Black | Dr. Leanne Rorish |
| 2013–14 | The Newsroom | Rebecca Halliday |
| Trophy Wife | Diane | |
| 2012 | Body of Proof | Sheila Temple |
| Bent | Vanessa Carter | |
| Tron: Uprising | Keller (voice) | |
| Isabel | Frances Lorenz | |
| 2011 | Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy | Edda Mellas |
| Innocent | Barbara Sabich | |
| 2010 | Royal Pains | Dr. Elizabeth Blair |
| 2009 | Damages | Claire Maddox |
| The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler | Janina Kyzyzanowska | |
| 2008 | The Tower | Zoe Cafritz |
| Sex and Lies in Sin City | Becky Binion | |
| 2006 | In from the Night | Vicki Miller |
| 2005 | Felicity: An American Girl Adventure | Mrs. Martha Merriman |
| 2005–13 | Law & Order: Special Victims Unit | FBI Special Agent Dana Lewis |
| 2004 | She’s Too Young | Trish Vogul |
| 2002 | Guilty Hearts | Jenny Moran |
| King of Texas | Mrs. Susannah Lear Tumlinson | |
| 2001 | Walking Shadow | Susan Silverman |
| The Education of Max Bickford | Andrea Haskell | |
| 2000 | Thin Air | Susan Silverman |
| 1999 | Spenser: Small Vices | Susan Silverman |
| 1998 | Labor of Love | Annie Pines |
| 1997 | Path to Paradise: The Untold Story of the World Trade Center Bombing | Nancy Floyd |
| 1995 | Fallen Angels | Marie |
| Chicago Hope | Barbara Tomilson | |
| Great Performances | ||
| Homicide: Life on the Street | Joan Garbarek | |
| 1992 | Sinatra | Ava Gardner |
| 1991 | In Broad Daylight | Adina Rowan |
| Fever | Lacy | |
| 1989 | Gideon Oliver | Lila |
| 1988 | Simon & Simon | Librarian, Joan |
| 1987 | CBS Summer Playhouse | Kim |
Marcia Gay Harden Awards
| Year | Association | Category | Nominated work | Result |
| 2016 | Golden Nymph Award | Best Actress in a TV Series | Code Black | Won |
| People’s Choice Awards | Favorite Actress in a New TV Series | Code Black | Nominated | |
| 2009 | Primetime Emmy Awards | Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or Movie | The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler | Nominated |
| 2008 | Screen Actors Guild | Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture | Into the Wild | Nominated |
| 2007 | Primetime Emmy Awards | Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series | Law & Order: Special Victims Unit | Nominated |
| Independent Spirit Awards | Best Supporting Female | American Gun | Nominated | |
| Saturn Awards | Best Supporting Actress | The Mist | Won | |
| 2004 | Academy Awards | Best Actress in a Supporting Role | Mystic River | Nominated |
| Broadcast Film Critics Association | Best Supporting Actress | Mystic River | Nominated | |
| Screen Actors Guild | Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture | Mystic River | Nominated | |
| Satellite Awards | Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role, Drama | Mystic River | Nominated | |
| 2003 | Satellite Awards | Best Performance by an Actress in a Miniseries or a Motion Picture Made for Television | King of Texas | Nominated |
| Boston Society of Film Critics | Best Ensemble Cast | Mystic River | Won | |
| Chicago Film Critics Association | Best Supporting Actress | Mystic River | Nominated | |
| 2001 | Academy Awards | Best Actress in a Supporting Role | Pollock | Won |
| Independent Spirit Awards | Best Supporting Female | Pollock | Nominated | |
| National Society of Film Critics | Best Supporting Actress | Pollock | Nominated | |
| 2000 | New York Film Critics Circle | Best Supporting Actress | Pollock | Won |
| 1996 | National Board of Review of Motion Pictures | Best Acting by an Ensemble | The First |
