Sarah Paulson's big break came two decades into her career
Sarah Paulson worked steadily from 1994 through a run of cancelled shows and cool reviews. Then Ryan Murphy put her in American Horror Story, where she played nine seasons of wildly different characters, including a pair of conjoined twins. Playing prosecutor Marcia Clark in 2016 finally brought her the lead-actress Emmy.
Paulson was born in Tampa on December 17, 1974. Her parents split when she was five, and her mother, then 27 and knowing nobody in New York, moved the girls first to Maine and then to the city, where she waited tables at Sardi's. Summers were spent in Florida with her father, an executive at a door manufacturer. Sarah trained at Manhattan's LaGuardia performing-arts high school and then the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
She started acting straight out of school. Her Broadway debut, in 1994, was as a replacement understudy in Wendy Wasserstein's The Sisters Rosensweig, and the following year she played a murdered woman's ghost in the short-lived series American Gothic. For years the pattern repeated: Leap of Faith on NBC drew unflattering comparisons to Sex and the City, The D.A. lasted four episodes, Cupid six, and a 2005 Glass Menagerie revival with Jessica Lange was panned in The New York Times as misdirected. The bright spot was Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which earned her a Golden Globe nomination.
American Horror Story began for her with three guest episodes as the medium Billie Dean Howard. In the second season she became Lana Winters, a writer locked in an asylum for being gay, then a witch running a school in Coven, the conjoined Tattler twins in Freak Show and a ghostly addict in Hotel. Those roles produced a string of Emmy nominations. On film she played a brutal slave-owner's wife in 12 Years a Slave and Cate Blanchett's friend in Carol.
Her Marcia Clark in The People v. O.J. Simpson, which premiered in February 2016, swept the Emmy, the Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild award. She went on to play Linda Tripp in Impeachment, and returned to Broadway in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's play Appropriate, which won her a Tony for Best Actress in a Play. Time listed her among its 100 most influential people in 2017.
Source: Sarah Paulson
