Cynthia Nixon

Cynthia Nixon portrays Miranda Hobbes on the television series, Sex and the City.{{Cast

Biography
Cynthia Ellen Nixon was born in New York City on April 9, 1966. She made her film debut in “Little Darlings” in 1980.

Cynthia is most known for her role as Miranda, a career ambitious lawyer and control freak, in the SATC series as well as the fims.

Early Life
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”. 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” and “I Am the Cheese” and the 1982 off-Broadway productions of John Guare's “Lydie Breeze”. In 1985 she appeared alongsideJeff 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 2 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 2 theaters were just 2 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”. Nixon was part of the cast of the NBC miniseries “The Murder of Mary Phagan” starring Jack Lemmon and Kevin Spacey and portrayed the daughter of a presidential candidate (Michael Murphy) in “Tanner '88”, Robert Altman's political satire for HBO. She reprised the role for the 2004 sequel “Tanner on Tanner”.

Acting Career
Nixon at the Berlin premiere of “Sex and the City: The Movie”. 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 2 part “Angels in America”, received a Tony nomination for her performance in “Indiscretions” (“Les Parents Terribles”), 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”.

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”, “June Moon” and “As Bees in Honey Drown”, “Hope is the Thing with Feathers”, and “The Country Club”.

Nixon has contributed supporting performances to “Addams Family Values”, “Baby's Day Out”, “Marvin's Room”, and “The Out-of-Towners”.

Stardom
She raised her profile significantly as one of the 4 regulars of HBO's successful comedy “Sex and the City”, 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. 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”, as well as starring opposite Scott Bakula in the holiday “Papa's Angels”. 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.

After “Sex in the City”, Nixon did a guest character 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”, 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 Gregory House.

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 the “Sex and the City” feature film, directed by HBOexecutive producer Michael Patrick King and co-starring the cast of the original series. 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.

Personal life
Nixon has 2 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.

While in college, Nixon participated in the study abroad program Semester at Sea.

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 school 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 don’t really feel I’ve changed... I’d been with men all my life, and I’d never fallen in love with a woman. But when I did, it didn’t seem so strange. I’m 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, and quoted Nixon as saying, "I'm in a fantastic relationship. It's been about 4 years.” 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. Nixon’s “Sex and the City” co-star Kristin Davis, who also lent her support to the gay rights event, was also there when the announcement was made.

Breast cancer
In an interview with “Good Morning America” that aired on April 15, 2008, Nixon announced for the first time that she battled breast cancer, after being diagnosed during a routine mammogram in October, 2006. Initially she did not go public because of the stigma involved, but since then, she not only has openly admitted that she had cancer, she has become a breast cancer activist and was able to convince the head of NBC to air her breast cancer special in prime time. In 2008, she began to serve as Ambassador for Susan G. Komen for the Cure.