Swoosie Kurtz
Swoosie Kurtz's work has spanned stage, screen and television. She has played a wide range of roles in feature films that include Citizen Ruth, Liar Liar, Duplex, Bubble Boy, Cruel Intentions, Rules of Attraction, Dangerous Liaisons, Reality Bites, The World According to Garp, Against All Odds, Bright Lights, Big City, True Stories, Stanley and Iris and A Shock to the System. Kurtz received her ninth Emmy Award nomination for her performance in Huff on Showtime. Other Emmy nominations came for her guest performance on ER, her moving portrayal of a woman dying of AIDS in HBO's landmark And the Band Played On, the role of Alex in the long running NBC series Sisters, and her role in Love, Sidney opposite Tony Randall. She won the Emmy for her performance in Carol and Company. Other memorable television work has included The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader Murdering Mom, One Christmas, in which she starred with Katherine Hepburn, and More Tales of the City and HBO's Baja, Oklahoma, for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. On Broadway this season, Kurtz was nominated for the Tony Award for her performance in Heartbreak House. Previously, she received nominations for the Tony, the Outer Critics Circle and the Lucille Lortel Award for her harrowing portrayal of the mother of an abducted child in Frozen. She played Lillian Hellman in Nora Ephron's Imaginary Friends. She was honored with Tony Awards for her performances in John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves and Lanford Wilson's Fifth of July, for which she also received the Drama Desk Award and the Outer Critics Award, Broadway's 'Triple Crown.' She earned the Drama Desk and the Obie Award for Wendy Wasserstein's Uncommon Women and Others, a Drama Desk Award for Christopher Durang's A History of American Film, and a Tony nomination for Tartuffe. She started at Lincoln Center in John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation, and in Terrence McNally's Lips Together, Teeth Apart, at the Manhattan Theater Club. Off Broadway she was a member of the original three women cast of The Vagina Monologues. At the Roundabout, Kurtz played both the title roles of identical twins in Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Paula Vogel's The Mineola Twins. For this critically acclaimed performance, she won her third Obie Award. A graduate of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Kurtz's
distinctive first name comes from the B 17, The Swoose, now in the
permanent collection of the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum.
The airplane, with its record setting fame, was flown by her father,
Col. Frank Kurtz, who was the most decorated Air Force pilot of
World War II. - from ABC.com |
