Emmy winner Laura Linney gets Hollywood Walk of Fame star

A star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was unveiled Monday honoring four-time Emmy winner Laura Linney for a television career that has earned her eight Emmy nominations, including three outstanding lead actress in a drama series nominations for her latest series, the Netflix crime thriller “Ozark.”

Linney called the Walk of Fame ceremony “even more overwhelming than I thought it would be.”

“If someone had told me 20 years ago that this camera-shy theater person would be represented amongst her idols of film and television, I would never have believed it,” Linney told the crowd. “I would simply have deemed it absolute crazy talk. It would have been ludicrous and it would have sounded to me as puzzling and indecipherable as Charlie Brown’s teacher.

“And I can honestly tell you, that even after 30 years, I am still on a daily basis quietly stunned and not so quietly exhilarated to be embraced by not only Los Angeles itself, but by the industries, the businesses and the people here that I love that call this place home.”

“Ozark” showrunner Chris Mundy and Holland Taylor, a castmate of Linney in the 1998 film “The Truman Show,” were among those who joined Linney at the ceremony at 6533 Hollywood Blvd., between Hudson and Whitley avenues.

The star is next to the star of Jason Bateman, who portrayed her husband on “Ozark,” which ended its four-season run April 29. It is the 2,727th since the completion of the Walk of Fame in 1961 with the first 1,558 stars.

Linney received her first Emmy in 2002 for outstanding lead actress in a miniseries or a movie for her portrayal of a depressed woman battles with her mother (Gena Rowlands) and abuses alcohol following the suicide of her husband in “Wild Iris.”

Linney has won twice more in the category, in 2008 for portraying first lady Abigail Adams in HBO’s “John Adams” and in 2013 for her starring role as a high school teacher diagnosed with melanoma in the four-episode final season of the Showtime dramedy “The Big C.” Linney received an outstanding lead actress in a comedy series nomination for the role in 2011.

Linney won an outstanding guest actress in a comedy series Emmy in 2004 for her recurring role on the final season of the NBC comedy “Frasier” as a matchmaking agent Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) falls for.

Linney is a three-time Oscar nominee. She received best actress nominations in 2001 for her role as a single mother living in a small Catskill Mountains town with complicated relationships with family and friends in “You Can Count on Me” and in 2008 as a woman who joins her brother (Philip Seymour Hoffman) to care for their estranged, elderly father, Lenny (Philip Bosco), who is rapidly slipping into dementia in “The Savages.”

Linney received a best supporting actress nomination in 2008 for her portrayal of the wife of pioneering human sexuality researcher Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson) in the biopic “Kinsey.”

Born Feb. 5, 1964, in New York City, Linney would spend summers in New Hampshire with her father, playwright and professor Romulus Linney, and fell in love with the stage working with a local theater group when she was 11 years old.

Linney received a bachelor’s degree from Brown University in 1986, then studied acting at the Juilliard School. She made her Broadway debut in 1991 in “Six Degrees of Separation.” Her first film was the 1992 drama “Lorenzo’s Oil,” and first television project was the 1993 ABC made-for-television Civil War movie, “Class of ’61.”

Linney’s other film credits include “Nocturnal Animals,” “Sully,” “Hyde Park On Hudson,” “The Squid and the Whale,” “Mystic River” and “Love Actually.”

Linney’s other television credits include the 1993 miniseries “Tales of the City,” its 1998 and 2001 sequels “More Tales of the City,” and “Further Tales of the City” and 2019 revival “Tales of the City.”

Linney also appeared on Broadway in “The Seagull,” “Hedda Gabler”; “Holiday”; “Honour”; “Uncle Vanya”; “The Crucible”; “Sight Unseen”; “Les Liaisons Dangereuses”; “Time Stands Still”; “The Little Foxes” and “My Name is Lucy Barton.”

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