As a Barnard freshman, Cynthia Nixon ran between two Broadway hits nightly
In 1984 a teenage Cynthia Nixon played in two Mike Nichols productions at once, dashing the two blocks between theatres because both parts were short. Decades before Miranda in Sex and the City, she was already a stage veteran, and she would collect Emmys, Tonys and a Grammy along the way.
Born in Manhattan in 1966, Nixon was the only child of a Texan radio journalist and a Chicago-born actress whom she credits with drawing her into theatre. Her parents split when she was six, and her mother, the main earner, worked on the game show To Tell the Truth. That is where Nixon first appeared on screen, aged 8, posing as an impostor claiming to be a junior riding champion. At 12 she acted in an ABC Afterschool Special, and in 1980 she made both her film debut in Little Darlings and her Broadway debut in The Philadelphia Story.
She kept performing through Hunter College High School and paid her way through Barnard College, graduating in English literature. The famous double shift came in her first year there: she played Jeremy Irons's daughter in The Real Thing and a young woman meeting seedy Hollywood types in Hurlyburly. That same year she appeared as a maid and spy for Salieri in Amadeus, and she later played Juliet for the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1988.
Wider fame arrived as Miranda Hobbes in HBO's Sex and the City from 1998 to 2004, followed by two films and the revival And Just Like That. The trophies piled up: a Tony for Rabbit Hole in 2006 and another for The Little Foxes in 2017, a guest-acting Emmy for Law and Order: Special Victims Unit in 2008, and a spoken-word Grammy for An Inconvenient Truth in 2009. That puts her among the few actresses to hold three of the four major American entertainment awards.
Nixon has campaigned for LGBT rights, especially marriage equality. She met her wife at a gay rights rally in 2002 and announced their engagement at a marriage rally in 2009. In 2018 she challenged Andrew Cuomo for governor of New York and lost the Democratic primary by 34 percent to 66.
Source: Cynthia Nixon
