Laura Linney

Born: February 1964
Where: New York, USA

The actress attracted international attention with her Oscar-nominated turn in 2000 as a single mother in You Can Count On Me.

She went on to receive another Academy Award nomination - this time for for best supporting actress - for Kinsey opposite Liam Neeson.

Daughter of playwright Romulus Linney, she graduated from Ivy League university Brown in 1986 and studied acting at Julliard and the Arts Theater School in Moscow.

She then launched a stage career on Broadway stage, receiving decent notices for Hedda Gabler and Six Degrees of Separation.

Her big screen career began with a small role as a young teacher in Lorenzo's Oil and she made an impression as the secretary sleeping with the president in the Ivan Reitman-directed Dave.

Linney went on to co-star with Steve Martin in A Simple Twist of Fate and then landed her first starring roles in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City on TV.

She also appeared as a member of an expedition into the jungles of South America in the critically derided but financially successful Congo in 1995.

Linney's ascendancy continued with the co-starring role as Richard Gere's adversary in Primal Fear and was cemented when Clint Eastwood tapped her to portray his daughter in political thriller Absolute Power.

After The Truman Show as Jim Carrey's wife, in You Can Count on Me she turned in a richly nuanced turn as a woman coping with a demanding new boss (Matthew Broderick).

She then played bitchy Manhattan society matron Bertha Dorset in the exquisite adaptation of The House of Mirth.

Linney also starred in the supernatural thriller The Mothman Prophecies, The Life of David Gale and Clint Eastwood's Oscar-winning Mystic River.

Recent work includes the Richard Curtis-directed Love Actually with Hugh Grant and Colin Firth.

In 2005, she lost out to Cate Blanchett for best supporting actress Oscar for her role in Kinsey (she put on 30lbs for the role by gorging on Krispy Kreme doughnuts).

The same year she played a lawyer defending priest Tom Wilkinson in the thriller The Exorcism of Emily Rose.

Subsequent roles included Gabriel Byrne's wife in the hard-hitting drama Jinadabyne, Barry Levinson's Man of the Year and the American intelligence thriller Breach.

In 2007 she starred as a WASP socialite in the lamentable The Nanny Diaries but atoned for this error as one of two warring siblings (alongside Philip Seymour Hoffman) in The Savages.