Cynthia Nixon

Cynthia Ellen Nixon (born April 9, 1966) is an American actress, activist, and theater director. During her career, she received various accolades, including two Primetime Emmy Awards, two Tony Awards, and a Grammy Award, making her one of the few actresses to have won three of the four major American entertainment awards (EGOT), as well as was nominated for six Golden Globe Awards. Nixon may be best known for her portrayal of Miranda Hobbes in the HBO series Sex and the City (1998–2004) and films Sex and the City (2008) and Sex and the City 2 (2010), as well as the television show And Just Like That... (2021–2025).

Nixon made her Broadway debut in the 1980 revival of The Philadelphia Story. She went on to receive two Tony Awards: the first for Best Actress in a Play for Rabbit Hole (2006), and the second for Best Featured Actress in a Play for The Little Foxes (2017). Her other Broadway credits include The Real Thing (1983), Hurlyburly (1983), Indiscretions (1995), The Women (2001), and Wit (2012).

She won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in 2008 and a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for An Inconvenient Truth in 2009. She acted in the films Amadeus (1984), James White (2015), and A Quiet Passion (2016). She portrayed Eleanor Roosevelt in Warm Springs (2005), Michele Davis in Too Big to Fail (2011), and Nancy Reagan in Killing Reagan (2016). Her other television credits include The Big C (2010–2011), Ratched (2020), and The Gilded Age (2022–present).

In 2018, Nixon ran for Governor of New York as part of the Working Families Party challenging Democratic incumbent Andrew Cuomo. She lost the Democratic primary to Cuomo on September 13, 2018, with 34% of the vote to his 66%. Nixon has been an advocate for LGBT rights in the United States, particularly the right of same-sex marriage. She met her wife at a 2002 gay rights rally, and announced her engagement at a rally for New York same-sex marriage in 2009. She received the Visibility Award from the Human Rights Campaign in 2018.

Nixon was born in the Manhattan borough of New York City, the only child of Walter Elmer Nixon Jr., a radio journalist from Harlingen, Texas, and Anne Elizabeth (née Knoll), an actress originally from Chicago. She credits her mother with "indoctrinating" her into theatre. She is of English and German descent. Her grandparents were Adolph Knoll, Etta Elizabeth Williams, Walter E. Nixon, and Grace Truman McCormack. Nixon's parents divorced when she was six years old. According to Nixon, her father was often unemployed and her mother was the household's main breadwinner: Nixon's mother worked on the game show To Tell the Truth, coaching the "impostors" who claimed to be the person described by the host.

Nixon was an actress all through her years at Hunter College Elementary School and Hunter College High School (class of 1984), often taking time away from school to perform in film and on stage. Nixon also acted in order to pay her way through Barnard College, where she received a B.A. in English Literature. Nixon was also a student in the Semester at Sea Program in the Spring of 1986.

Nixon's first onscreen appearance (at 8 years old) was as an imposter on To Tell the Truth, where her mother worked, pretending to be a junior horse riding champion. She began acting at 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 1984, while a freshman at Barnard College, Nixon made theatrical history by simultaneously appearing in two hit Broadway plays directed by Mike Nichols. They were The Real Thing, where she 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. Onscreen, she played the role of Salieri's maid/spy, Lorl, in Amadeus (1984). In 1985, she appeared alongside Jeff Daniels in Lanford Wilson's Lemon Sky at Second Stage Theatre.