Marcia Gay Harden (born August 14, 1959) is an American actress. Her breakthrough came in 1990 with the Coen brothers' film Miller's Crossing. She received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Pollock (2000) and Mystic River (2003), winning for her portrayal of artist Lee Krasner in the former. Her other notable film credits include The First Wives Club (1996), Flubber (1997), Space Cowboys (2000), Mona Lisa Smile (2003), and the Fifty Shades film series (2015–2018).
Harden made her Broadway debut in 1993, starring in Tony Kushner's epic play Angels in America for which she was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play. She returned to Broadway in 2009 in Yasmina Reza's comedic play God of Carnage, with her performance earning her the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.
Harden's television credits include guest roles in the HBO series The Newsroom (2013–2014) and the ABC series How to Get Away with Murder (2015–2020), as well as main roles in the CBS series Code Black (2015–2018) and So Help Me Todd (2022–2024). She received Primetime Emmy Award nominations for her guest roles in the crime drama series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (2005) and the Apple TV+ series The Morning Show, and supporting role in the television film The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler (2009).
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Early life
Harden was born in the La Jolla area of San Diego, California, the daughter of Texas natives Beverly Harden (née Bushfield), a housewife, and Thad Harold Harden (1932–2002), who was a Captain and fighter pilot who served 30 years in the United States Navy. She has three sisters and one brother.
Harden's brother is named Thaddeus, as are her father and her former husband. Harden's family frequently moved because of her father's job, living in Japan, Germany, Greece, California, and Maryland.
Harden graduated from Surrattsville High School in Clinton, Maryland in 1976. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in theater from the University of Texas at Austin in 1980, and a Master of Fine Arts from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 1988.
Career
Harden's first film role was in a 1979 student-produced film at the University of Texas. Throughout the 1980s, she appeared in several television programs, including Simon & Simon, Kojak, and CBS Summer Playhouse. She appeared in The Imagemaker (1986), her first film screen role, in which she played a stage manager. She appeared in the Coen brothers' Miller's Crossing (1990), a 1930s mobster drama in which she first gained wide exposure. Even so, at the time, living in New York City, she had to go back to doing catering jobs "because I didn't have any money".
Harden debuted on Broadway in the role of Harper Pitt (and others) in Tony Kushner's Angels in America in 1993. The role earned her critical acclaim and she received a Tony Award nomination (Best Featured Actress in a Play).
Harden played actress Ava Gardner alongside Philip Casnoff as Frank Sinatra in the 1992 made-for-TV miniseries Sinatra. Throughout the 1990s, she continued to appear in films and television. Her notable film roles include the Disney sci-fi comedy Flubber (1997), 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); Labor of Love (1998), a Lifetime television film in which she starred with David Marshall Grant; and Space Cowboys (2000), an all-star adventure-drama about aging astronauts.
In 2000, Harden won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of painter Lee Krasner in the biographical film Pollock. In 2004, she received a second Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the mystery crime drama Mystic River.
Harden guest-starred as FBI undercover agent Dana Lewis posing as a white supremacist in "Raw", an episode of the popular crime drama Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. This role earned Harden her first Emmy Award nomination for best guest actress in a drama series in 2007. She reprised the role in the series' eighth-season premiere and again in the 12th-season episode "Penetration" as a rape victim.
Harden appeared in several 2007 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. Also in 2007, she shared top billing with Kevin Bacon in Rails & Ties, the directorial debut of Alison Eastwood. Harden played a woman who has a mastectomy in Home (2008). (Her character in Rails & Ties also had a mastectomy.) Scenes in both films required her to bare her breasts, with the missing breast removed using computer-generated imagery. In Home, her co-stars include her daughter, Eulala Scheel. Harden starred in the Christmas Cottage, a story of the early artistic beginnings of the painter Thomas Kinkade.
Personal life
In 1996, Harden married Thaddaeus Scheel, a prop master, with whom she worked on The Spitfire Grill. They have three children. In February 2012, Harden filed for divorce from Scheel.
Harden once owned property in the Catskills and a townhouse in Harlem. She sold the townhouse in 2012.
Harden is an avid potter, which she learned in high school, then took up again while acting in Angels in America. She is a practitioner of ikebana, the art of Japanese flower arrangement, which her mother learned when they lived in Japan. Harden gave a brief demonstration in 2007 on The Martha Stewart Show, and presented some works of her family.
In May 2018, a memoir called The Seasons of My Mother: A Memoir of Love, Family, and Flowers was published. The book details the story and bond of mother and daughter throughout time and how they are dealing with the largest struggle yet, her mother's Alzheimer's disease. Harden created works of ikebana specifically for this book to illustrate the different seasons of her mother's life.