Laura Benanti

Laura Ilene Benanti (née Vidnovic; born July 15, 1979) is an American actress and singer.

Benanti made her Broadway debut as an ensemble member and later as Maria von Trapp in the 1998 revival of The Sound of Music. Benanti went on to win the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical playing Louise in the revival of Gypsy (2008). She was Tony-nominated for her roles in Swing! (2000), Into the Woods (2002), Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (2010), and She Loves Me (2016). Her other notable Broadway roles include Nine (2003), In the Next Room (2009), Meteor Shower (2017), and My Fair Lady (2018).

On television she has had roles as Lauren Bennett on the NBC sitcom Go On (2012–2013), Sadie Stone in the ABC musical drama series Nashville (2014–2015), Alura and Astra in the CBS series Supergirl (2015–2016), Edie Randall in the TBS comedy The Detour (2017–2019), Kiki Hope in the HBO Max revival Gossip Girl (2021–2023), and as Susan Blane in the HBO drama series The Gilded Age (2023).

Since 2016, she has had a recurring role as First Lady Melania Trump on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Benanti was born in New York City to Linda Wonneberger, a vocal coach and former actress, and Martin Vidnovic, a Broadway actor and singer. She is of Serbian, German, and Irish heritage. Her parents divorced when she was young. She soon moved to Kinnelon, New Jersey, with her mother and stepfather Salvatore Benanti, a psychotherapist, whose name she took and whom she refers to as her father.

Benanti remembers being "very serious" and "a bit of an ugly duckling" as a child; she was intensely interested in musical theatre, saying she "came out of the womb as a 40-year-old". She was particularly interested in the music of Stephen Sondheim at an early age and distanced herself from other children. In 2008, Benanti told The New York Times that she drew on this loneliness in her portrayal of the neglected Louise in Gypsy. Though her parents refused to let Laura audition for professional theatre, Laura appeared in several high school and community productions, including Evita (as Perón's mistress), Follies (as Young Heidi), and Into the Woods (as Cinderella). At 16, Benanti played the title role in her high school production of Hello, Dolly! and won a Paper Mill Playhouse Rising Star Award for Outstanding Actress in a high school production. She graduated from Kinnelon High School in 1997.

In 1998, Paper Mill's then-artistic director Robert Johanson recommended Benanti for the role of Liesl in a Broadway revival of The Sound of Music. She auditioned for the show's producers and was considered too mature-looking to play Liesl, but, after several call-backs, was signed at the age of 18 to play one of the nuns and to understudy Rebecca Luker as Maria. Benanti played the role for two weeks while Luker was on vacation, and, at 19, took over the role when Luker left the production. Michael Buckley of Playbill later wrote that Benanti "was an absolutely wonderful Maria ... As do others, I believe that had she opened in the show, Benanti would have been an overnight sensation." When she was cast in The Sound of Music, Benanti had attended New York University for two weeks; the dean recommended she go on leave to take the job.

In 1999, Benanti appeared in the Broadway revue Swing!, for which she received a Tony nomination for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical. In 2000, she co-starred with Donna Murphy in the critically acclaimed New York City Center Encores! concert production of the Leonard Bernstein-Betty Comden-Adolph Green musical Wonderful Town. Benanti can be heard on the original cast albums of each of her Broadway roles, as well as compilation albums of Stephen Schwartz and Maury Yeston. She participated in a studio cast recording of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Allegro, which was released by Sony Classics in February 2009. She also appears as a guest artist on the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington, D.C.'s live album, You've Got to Be Carefully Taught: The Songs of Hammerstein & Sondheim, taken from a 2002 performance at the Kennedy Center. A songwriter and guitarist, Benanti has written songs privately since at least the early 2000s; in 2005, she said that she was working on a folk-rock solo CD, though "Musical theatre is my first love[...]I want to take my music and orchestrate it in a kind of old fashioned style, and take some standards and 'popularize' them—do a true crossover. I'm working on it."