About this Artist
Emmy Award winner Cynthia Nixon has been a critically acclaimed and sought-after actress since the age of twelve. Nixon was last seen in HBO's telepic "Warm Springs," in which she plays Eleanor Roosevelt opposite Kenneth Branagh's Franklin Roosevelt. This role has earned Nixon an Emmy nomination for Best Actress in a Miniseries or Movie. Last year she starred in the mini-series “Tanner on Tanner” directed by Robert Altman and written by Gary Trudeau, a sequel to “Tanner '88.” This September, she will co-star in New Regency's feature “Little Manhattan" opposite Bradley Whitford. Nixon can also be seen in director Alex Steyermark's "One Last Thing," which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12th.
Nixon starred in six seasons of HBO's much celebrated series, “Sex and the City,” in which she played Miranda Hobbes, a role that garnered her an Emmy Award in 2004 for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, two other Emmy nominations and four consecutive Golden Globe nominations. Nixon was honored with the 2001 and 2004 SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series.
This Winter, Nixon will star on Broadway in the Manhattan Theatre Club production of David Lindsay-Abair's play "Rabbit Hole." Nixon was last seen on Broadway performing as Mary Haines in The Roundabout's revival of “The Women,” which was also broadcast on PBS' “Stage to Screen” series. She was honored with a Tony nomination for her role in the Broadway hit “Indiscretions” as Madeleine, the vivacious bohemian Parisian bookbinder who is simultaneously having affairs with a quirky inventor played by Roger Rees, and his rambunctious son played by Jude Law. Nixon also appeared in Eve Ensler's “The Vagina Monologues” at both the Westside Arts Theater and in the historic V Day Performance at Madison Square Garden. For her performance onstage as Soos in Douglas Carter Beane's “The Country Club,” Nixon received rave notices, including one from John Heilpern of the New York Observer who declared her performance one of the two Best Comic Stage Performances by an Actress in 1999. Nixon won a Theater World Award at fourteen for her stage debut as Dinah Lord in Ellis Rabb's production of “The Philadelphia Story,” with Blythe Danner, at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater. At fifteen, she was directed by acclaimed filmmaker Louis Malle in the title role of John Guare's “Lydie Breeze.” Most remarkably, at age eighteen, she appeared simultaneously in two Broadway productions, David Rabe's “Hurlyburly” and Tom Stoppard's “The Real Thing,” both directed by Mike Nichols, while a freshman in her first semester at Barnard College. She acted throughout her college career, and a few months before graduation did double-duty again by starring as Juliet in the New York Shakespeare Festival Production of “Romeo and Juliet” and as Alex Tanner in HBO's “Tanner '88,” Robert Altman and Gary Trudeau's political spoof of the 1988 Presidential campaign. Nixon next appeared on Broadway in Wendy Wasserstein's “The Heidi Chronicles.” Other Broadway roles include: Harper Pitt, a young Mormon wife struggling with her husband's homosexuality in Tony Kushner's “Angels in America” (1994) and Lala Levy, a socially inept girl with Scarlett O'Hara-esque aspirations in Alfred Uhry's “The Last Night of Ballyhoo.” (1997). Classic stage roles include: Honey in “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” directed by playwright Edward Albee and costarring Glenda Jackson and John Lithgow (which earned her a Best Featured Actress Award nomination from the Los Angeles Drama Critics and a Robby Award nomination), Emily in “Our Town” (for which she received a Robby Award nomination), Hilde in Henrik Ibson's “The Master Builder” (opposite Sam Waterston), Raina in “Arms and the Man,” Melibea in Tony Kushner's adaptation of Pierre Corneilles' “The Illusion,” Hester Prynne in Phyllis Nagy's adaptation of “The Scarlet Letter” and Nora in Ibsen's “A Doll House.” As one of the founding members of the theater company, The Drama Dept., (along with J. Smith-Cameron, Nicky Silver, John Cameron Mitchel, Sarah Jessica Parker and Douglas Carter Beane), Nixon has appeared in their productions of Beane's “The Country Club,” Ring Lardner and George S. Kaufman's “June Moon,” Tennessee Williams' “Kingdom of Earth,” Frank Pugliese's “Hope is the Thing With Feathers” and Beane's “As Bees in Honey Drown.” Nixon's other New York stage appearances of note include: “On the Bum or, The Next Train Through” with Campbell Scott at Playwrights Horizons, “Servy-N-Bernice 4Ever” at the Provincetown Playhouse, “The Balcony Scene” at the Circle Repertory Company, “A Joke” opposite Ethan Hawke for the Malaparte theater group, and “Lemon Sky” and “Moonchildren” at the Second Stage. Nixon began her film career at age twelve with Ronald F. Maxwell's “Little Darlings” (as Sunshine, the flower child) and went on to appear in Sidney Lumet's “Prince of the City” (as a strung-out drug addict), Milos Forman's “Amadeus” (as Lorl, Mozart's maid), Robert Altman's “O.C. & Stiggs,” Marshal Brickman's “The Manhattan Project,” “Let it Ride,” “Addams Family Values,” “The Pelican Brief,” John Hughes' “Baby's Day Out,” “Marvin's Room,” “The Out-of-Towners,” “Igby Goes Down” and “Advice from a Caterpillar,” based on the play by the Drama Dept.'s Douglas Carter Beane. Nixon's very first professional job was an ABC After School Special, “Seven Wishes of a Rich Kid,” costarring Butterfly McQueen. Nixon went on to appear in PBS's presentation of Mark Twain's “Private History of a Campaign that Failed,” Lanford Wilson's “Fifth of July” and “Women and Wallace” (the last two for American Playhouse).
She has most recently appeared on network television in February 2005 in a guest role on NBC's "ER." Prior to that she was in the CBS telefilm “Papa's Angels.” She has also starred opposite Gena Rowlands in “Face of a Stranger,” Angela Lansbury in “The Love She Sought,” and when they were thirteen and fourteen, Nixon and Sarah Jessica Parker played Vanessa Redgrave's young daughters in “My Body, My Child,” about a woman's right to choose. Other favorite television roles include: a deaf crime victim in “The Equalizer,” a subway vigilante in “Law and Order,” a nose-ringed valley girl in “Nash Bridges,” a poor Southern factory worker in “The Murder of Mary Phagan,” and a woman giving birth in an elevator in “Early Edition,” filmed in the eighth month of Nixon's real-life pregnancy.
Born and raised in New York City, Nixon attended Hunter College High School and has a degree in English Literature from Barnard College. She has been acting professionally since the age of 12, in television, theater and film. She lives in New York City with her eight year-old daughter, Samantha and two year-old son Charlie.