Mary-Louise Parker

Mary-Louise Parker (born August 2, 1964 in Fort Jackson, South Carolina) is an American actress. She has been the recipient of the Tony, Emmy and Golden Globe awards. Her best-known works include Fried Green Tomatoes, Boys on the Side, Proof, The West Wing, Angels in America, and her current role on Showtime's Weeds.

Parker majored in drama at the North Carolina School of the Arts. She then got her start in a bit part on the soap opera Ryan's Hope.

In the late 1980s, Parker moved to New York, where she got a job measuring feet at ECCO. After a few minor roles, she made her Broadway debut in a 1990 production of Craig Lucas' Prelude to a Kiss, playing the lead role of Rita. She won the Clarence Derwent Award for her performance and was nominated for a Tony Award. Parker also briefly dated her co-star Timothy Hutton during this time. When Prelude to a Kiss was made into a film, Meg Ryan took over Parker's role.

That same year, Parker was noticed by critics worldwide when she appeared in the movie adaptation of another Lucas play, Longtime Companion, one of the first movies to confront AIDS in the public arena.

This role was followed by her appearance in 1991's Grand Canyon, which also starred Mary McDonnell, Alfre Woodard and Kevin Kline. Parker's next film was Fried Green Tomatoes, alongside Jessica Tandy, Mary Stuart Masterson, Kathy Bates and Cicely Tyson.

Parker maintained a strong theater presence in the early 1990s, but also maintained her reputation on the big screen, starring with Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones in The Client (1994); with John Cusack in Bullets Over Broadway (1994); and with Drew Barrymore and Whoopi Goldberg in Boys on the Side (1995) as a woman with AIDS. Her next role was in a movie adaptation of yet another Craig Lucas play, Reckless (1995), alongside Mia Farrow, followed by Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady (1996), which also starred Nicole Kidman, Viggo Mortensen, Christian Bale, John Malkovich and Barbara Hershey. In addition, she appeared alongside Matthew Modine in Tim Hunter's The Maker (1997).

Though Parker was not a household name, she flourished out of the spotlight as a critics' darling. Her theater career continued when she appeared in Paula Vogel's 1997 critical smash How I Learned To Drive, with David Morse. After several independent film releases, she appeared in Let The Devil Wear Black and then a much-lauded role in The Five Senses (1999).

On January 7, 2004, Parker, at age 39, gave birth to her first child, William Atticus Parker. The boy's father is actor Billy Crudup, whom Parker met when they co-starred in a 1996 revival of the William Inge play Bus Stop. After nearly eight years together, the couple split when the actress was seven months pregnant. There were rumors that the breakup was due to an affair between Crudup and his Stage Beauty co-star, Claire Danes.

Parker dated her former Weeds cast member, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and had stated that the relationship is "going great".[3] In June 2007, Morgan told People that the couple had split.[4]

In the past, Parker has dated Adam Duritz of the Counting Crows and Timothy Hutton.