Cynthia Ellen Nixon born April 9, 1966 is an American actress, known for her portrayal of Miranda Hobbes in the HBO series Sex and the City (1998-2004). She is an Emmy, Tony and Grammy award winning actress.
Nixon was born in New York City, New York, the daughter of Anne Knoll, an actress, and Walter Nixon, a radio journalist. Her first onscreen appearance was as an imposter on To Tell the Truth, where her mother worked. She began acting at age 12 as the object of a wealthy schoolmate's crush in The Seven Wishes of a Rich Kid, a 1979 ABC Afterschool Special.
She made her feature debut co-starring with Kristy McNichol and Tatum O'Neal in Little Darlings (1980). She made her Broadway debut as Dinah Lord in a 1980 revival of The Philadelphia Story. Alternating between film, TV and stage she did projects like the 1982 ABC-movie My Body, My Child, the features Prince of the City (1981) and I Am the Cheese (1983) and the 1982 off-Broadway productions of John Guare's Lydie Breeze. In 1985 she appeared alongside Jeff Daniels in Lanford Wilson's Lemon Sky at Second Stage Theatre.
Nixon graduated from Hunter College High School, and made theatrical history while a freshman at Barnard College in 1984, simultaneously appearing in two hit Broadway plays directed by Mike Nichols. These were The Real Thing, where Nixon played the daughter of Jeremy Irons and Christine Baranski; and Hurlyburly, where she played a young woman who encounters sleazy Hollywood executives. The two theaters were just two blocks apart and Nixon's roles were both short, so she could run from one to the other. She landed her first major supporting part in a movie as an intelligent teenager who aids her boyfriend (Christopher Collet) in building a nuclear bomb in Marshall Brickman's The Manhattan Project (1986). Nixon was part of the cast of the NBC miniseries The Murder of Mary Phagan (NBC, 1988) starring Jack Lemmon and Kevin Spacey and portrayed the daughter of a presidential candidate (Michael Murphy) in Tanner '88 (also 1988), Robert Altman's political satire for HBO. She reprised the role for the 2004 sequel Tanner on Tanner. On stage, Nixon portrayed Juliet in a 1988 New York Shakespeare Festival production of Romeo and Juliet and acted in the workshop production of Wendy Wasserstein's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Heidi Chronicles, playing several characters after it came to Broadway in 1989.
She replaced Marcia Gay Harden as Harper Pitt in Tony Kushner's landmark two-part Angels in America (1994), received a Tony nomination for her performance in Indiscretions (Les Parents Terribles) (1996, her sixth Broadway show) and, though she originally lost the part to another actress, eventually took over the role of Lala Levy in the Tony-winning The Last Night of Ballyhoo (1997). Nixon was a founding member of the theatrical troupe The Drama Dept., which included Sarah Jessica Parker, Dylan Baker, John Cameron Mitchell and Billy Crudup among its actors, appearing in the group's productions of Kingdom on Earth (1996), June Moon and As Bees in Honey Drown (both 1997), Hope is the Thing with Feathers (1998), and The Country Club (1999). Nixon has contributed supporting performances to Addams Family Values (1993), Baby's Day Out (1994), Marvin's Room (1996) and The Out-of-Towners (1999). She raised her profile significantly as one of the four regulars of HBO's successful comedy Sex and the City (19982004), as the lawyer Miranda Hobbes. After Emmy nominations as Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 2002 and 2003, Nixon took home the trophy in 2004 for the series' final season. Nixon, John Hurt and Swoosie Kurtz at the premiere of An Englishman in New York.
The immense popularity of the series led Nixon to enjoy her first leading role in a feature, playing a video artist who falls in love, despite her best efforts to avoid commitment, with a bisexual actor who just happens to be dating a gay man (her best friend) in Advice From a Caterpillar (2000), as well as starring opposite Scott Bakula in the holiday telepic Papa's Angels (2000). In 2002 she also landed a role in the indie comedy Igby Goes Down, and her turn in the theatrical production of Clare Booth Luce's play The Women was captured for PBS' Stage On Screen series. Post-Sex in the City, Nixon did a guest stint on ER in 2005 as a mother who undergoes a tricky procedure to lessen the effects of a debilitating stroke. She followed up with a turn as Eleanor Roosevelt for HBO's Warm Springs (2005), which chronicled Franklin Delano Roosevelt's quest for a miracle cure for his polio. Nixon earned an Emmy nomination as Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie for her performance.
In December 2005, she appeared in the Fox hit series House in the episode "Deception", as a patient who suffers a seizure and matches wits with Dr. House (Hugh Laurie). In 2006, Nixon won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Play) for David Lindsay-Abaire's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Rabbit Hole. That same year, Nixon won the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album along with Beau Bridges and Blair Underwood for the album An Inconvenient Truth (Al Gore). In 2008, she revived her role as Miranda Hobbes in Sex and the City feature film, directed by HBO executive producer Michael Patrick King and co-starring the cast of the original series. Also in 2008, she won an Emmy for her guest appearance in an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, where she portrayed a woman with dissociative identity disorder. Nixon has two children, daughter Samantha (b. 1995) and son Charles Ezekiel (b. 2002), with Danny Mozes, an English professor, with whom she was in a relationship from 1988 to 2003. Nixon began dating education activist Christine Marinoni in January 2004; media reports of the relationship started surfacing in September of the same year.
In February 2005, the New York Post and other sources reported that Nixon had moved to Brooklyn to live with Marinoni. However, Nixon told the The New York Times in January 2006 that she had not moved and that keeping her kids in their Manhattan public schools took priority. Discussing her relationship in an interview in New York Magazine in 2006, Nixon stated that she never felt any struggle with her sexuality: "I never felt like there was an unconscious part of me around that woke up or that came out of the closet; there wasn't a struggle, there wasn't an attempt to suppress. I met this woman, I fell in love with her, and I'm a public figure." In an interview in May 2007, she said: In terms of sexual orientation I dont really feel Ive changed... Id been with men all my life, and Id never fallen in love with a woman. But when I did, it didnt seem so strange. Im just a woman in love with another woman.
In March 2008, Fox News reported that Nixon has been in a relationship with Marinoni since 2003. "I'm in a fantastic relationship. It's been about four years", Nixon, 41 at the time, said." In April 2008, she received an award from the Point Foundation, which provides scholarships to gay students in the U.S., for being a role model for young gay people. At a rally in support of same-sex marriage on May 17, 2009, Nixon announced that she and Marinoni had become engaged the month before. Nixon made the announcement during the Love, Peace and Marriage Equality rally in New York. She told the crowd there that she would soon walk down the aisle with Marinoni, reports Contactmusic. Nixons Sex in the City costar Kristin Davis, who also lent her support to the gay rights event, was also there when the announcement was made. Though Nixon is into the girls now she has had her experiences with guys but just didnt feel the same. She says dont get her wrong the way a man feels when he is up inside your pussy is an awesome feeling. The hard cock going in and out fucking her til she came is great but the touch of another female is better. Maybe its just because she can bond more with a women that makes the sex so much more arrousing. She said she would consider having a man join her and girlfriend just to have the feel of the hard cock but to share the emotion with her lover.
