Katie Finneran

Born in Chicago, Katie Finneran was raised in Miami, where she gave some of her first performances in Christmas pageants. She made acting her primary focus at Miami's New School of the Arts and Carnegie Mellon, which she attended for a year before leaving to study under Uta Hagen in New York. Stage and screen roles soon materialized for Finneran: she appeared on Broadway in "My Favorite Year" (1992) and "The Heiress" (1995) while appearing in bit and supporting roles in Nora Ephron's "You've Got Mail" (1998) and Barry Levinson's "Liberty Heights" (1999). Her Broadway career soon blossomed with substantial roles in major productions like "Cabaret" and the revival of Eugene O'Neil's "The Iceman Cometh" with Kevin Spacey, Paul Giamatti and Michael Emerson in 1999. Finneran reached a high-water mark in her career in 2002 with a Tony and Drama Desk Award for her comic turn as an accident-prone player in "Noises Off." The accolades provided a brief uptick for her television career, including work as a series regular on the short-lived sitcom "Bram and Alice" (CBS 2002) and the critically acclaimed, if equally brief fantasy "Wonderfalls," which cast her as the secretly gay sister of series lead Caroline Dhavernas. Finneran worked steadily, if anonymously, in features and television over the next half-decade while also balancing regular appearances in Off-Broadway shows. She was featured in two more series with short life spans - the crime drama "The Inside" (Fox 2005) and the car race action show "Drive" (Fox 2007) - and enjoyed minor roles in "Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous" (2005) and "Bewitched" (2005), among other films. In 2010, she won her second Tony for her scene-stealing turn as the boozy Marge MacDougall in the Broadway revival of Neil Simon's "Promises, Promises." After departing the show in 2010 to give birth to her first child, Finneran co-starred as a nouveau Southern Belle on the comedy "I Hate My Teenage Daughter" (Fox 2011-2012). She then returned briefly to Broadway to play the broadly malevolent Miss Hannigan in a revival of "Annie" before leaving the show to join the cast of "The Michael J. Fox Show." Though the sitcom received mixed reviews, most critics and viewers singled out Finneran's turn as Fox's larger-than-life sister for praise.