Jessica Lange

Posted August 27, 201014 yr

(From Wikipédia)

Jessica Phyllis Lange (born April 20, 1949) is an American stage and screen actress. With a career that has spanned thirty-five years and six Academy Award nominations (including two wins), she may be most notable for her performances in Frances, Tootsie, Sweet Dreams, Blue Sky, and Grey Gardens.

Lange, the third of four children, was born in Cloquet, Minnesota, the daughter of Dorothy Florence (née Sahlman) and Albert John Lange, who was a teacher and salesman. Her maternal grandparents were of Finnish descent, while her paternal grandparents were German and Dutch.She studied art briefly at the University of Minnesota before going to Paris, France, where she studied mime with Étienne Decroux. She returned to New York City, New York in 1973 and took acting lessons while working as a waitress and a fashion model for the Wilhelmina Models agency. She was discovered by the fashion illustrator Antonio in 1974.

In 1976, Dino De Laurentiis cast her in his motion picture remake of King Kong, which both started and almost ended her career. Although the King Kong remake was a top moneymaker for Paramount Pictures, critics were not kind to the film and Lange did not appear in another film for three years, when Bob Fosse cast her as the glamorous figure of death in All That Jazz (1979). The unfavorable reviews were devastating but critics took notice with her impressive turn in Bob Rafelson's remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981).

Her performance in her next film, Frances (1982), in which she portrayed actress Frances Farmer, was highly lauded and earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She received two Academy Award nominations that year, the other for Best Supporting Actress in the comedy Tootsie (1982), for which she won. She continued giving impressive performances through the 1980s and 1990s in films such as Sweet Dreams (1985) (playing country/western singer Patsy Cline), Music Box (1989), Men Don't Leave (1990), and Blue Sky (1994), directed by Tony Richardson, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She portrayed the wife of the titular legendary Scottish hero in Rob Roy alongside Liam Neeson (1995).

Since 2000, Lange has mostly appeared in supporting roles on screen. In 2006, she appeared as part of the ensemble cast of Kathy Bates and Joan Allen in Bonneville. In her most recent film, she played Edith "Big Edie" Bouvier Beale in Grey Gardens (2009), a film based in part on biographical information, and in part on the 1970s cult documentary. Her performance earned her an Emmy Award.

In 1992, Lange made her Broadway-theatre début in New York City opposite Alec Baldwin in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire. She appeared in the West End in London, United Kingdom, in 2000, as Mary Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. In 2005, she returned to Broadway in another Tennessee Williams play, The Glass Menagerie with Christian Slater.

She is a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). She has also been a public critic of former U.S. President George W. Bush, once calling his administration, "a self-serving regime of deceit, hypocrisy and belligerence."

Lange was married to photographer Paco Grande from 1970-1981. Since 1982, she has lived with playwright/actor Sam Shepard. She has three children, Aleksandra (born 1981) from her relationship with dancer/actor Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Hannah Jane (born 1985) and Samuel Walker (born 1987) with Shepard.

Lange currently lives in New York City.