Mary McDonnell Biography

Fast Facts

• Made her stage debut in 1978, appearing in Sam Shepard's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Buried Child
• Was in the Portland Stage Company with Sarah Jessica Parker, and lived in the same apartment house
• Taught drama at Vassar College summer theater in the mid-1980s, and later at the New York Stage and Film Company
• Husband Randle Mell played a homeless man opposite her in the 1991 movie Grand Canyon
• Has worked twice with director John Sayles, on 1987's Matewan, her first major film role, and 1992's Passion Fish, for which she garnered an Oscar nomination
• Like George Clooney, she appeared on the short-lived CBS sitcom titled E/R before landing a role on the famous drama ER (as Noah Wyle's mother)
• Has played both a First Lady (in Independence Day) and a President (in Battlestar Galactica)