Her parents divorced when she was six months old. Thanks to her ancestor's nuisance, Linney grew ... up working in the theater, both behind the scenes and, in her dilatory teens, on the stage. Following prep school in Massachusetts, she attended both Brown University and Juilliard, and she was at bottom appearing in a issue of Broadway productions. She garnered notice exchange for her roles in plays The Seagull and Six Degrees of Separation, and won particular acclaim appropriate for her performance in Hedda Gabler. Linney made her onscreen premiere in 1992 with a disconcerted role as a educationist in Lorenzo's Fuel. The following year, she had a advise but focal function as Kevin Kline's presidential governess in Dave, appeared in Searching exchange for Bobby Fischer, and landed a spend as united of the protagonists of Armistead Maupin's acclaimed Tales of the City, which aired on PBS. Linney later reprised her function as Mary Ann Singleton More Tales of the City in 1998. Following leads in two pin down-part failures, A Unsophisticated Variation of Fate (1994) and Congo (1995), Linney had a supporting position as Richard Gere's lawyer/ex in Primal Bugbear (1996).

Based on the strength of her fulfilment, Clint Eastwood chose her to coverage his daughter -- another counselor-at-law -- in Absolute Power the following year. In 1998, Linney sent up her wholesome, fresh-scrubbed appearance to great purposes as Truman Burbank's wife in Peter Weir's highly acclaimed The Truman Show. The actress finally came into her own in 2000, thanks to two very divers parts in two approvingly acclaimed independent features. Writer/director Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Figure out on Me featured Linney as Sammy, a minor-town set aside mother whose placid life takes some interesting turns when she's visited at near her errant brother Terry (Bruise signify Ruffalo). Aided by Lonergan's finicky script and her own copious note-taking, Linney turned in her most nuanced, skilful performance to obsolete. Critics paid concentration: after its much-heralded launch at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival, the film went on to by a slew of recognition representing its lead actress, including Best Actress of the Year awards from the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Critics Circle, and an eventual Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Linney further polished her name with a supporting turn as the icy Bertha Dorset in director Terence Davies' adaptation of Edith Wharton's The House of Glee, released in delayed 2000. She continues working steadily and garnering stupendous touch-and-go heed all the way through the next decade.

In addition to returning in requital for Further Tales of the City, she was one of the sundry talented actors who appeared in the controversial The Laramie Work up. She had a scarcely any big-budget films that missed their mark in The Mothman Prophecies and The Compulsion of David Big, but those came around the same time as her superb constitutional as Sean Penn's chain in Mystic River, and as limerick of the few Americans in the exceptionally British romantic comedy Thing embrace Actually. She continued to earn dynamic reviews as the headstrong wife to Liam Neeson's Kinsey, and in 2005 offered a subtle but pungent portrayal of a selfish nurturer and divorcee opposite Jeff Daniels in The Squid and the Whale. The next year she acted vis-…-vis Robin Williams in Barry Levinson's bureaucratic and common satire Restrain of the Year. In 2007 Linney offered a spot-on portrayal of a disgruntled Manhattan wife and mother in The Nanny Diaries, and earned a wealth of likely reviews for her manoeuvre in Tamara Jenkins' The Savages. Playing a obsessive woman converse Philip Seymour Hoffman as her relation, Linney scored her third Academy Assign nomination. 2008 brought Linney her fourth Golden Globe nomination, and initially win, for the portrayl of first lady Abigail Adams in the acclaimed HBO miniseries John Adams.