Marcia Gay Harden

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Date of Birth : Aug 14th 1959

Harden, one of five children, was born in La Jolla, California, daughter of Beverly (née Bushfield), a housewife, and Thaddeus Harold Harden, a Texas native who was an officer in the Navy. One of her siblings is also named Thaddeus. Harden’s family frequently moved because of her father’s job, living in Japan, Germany, Greece, California and Maryland. She graduated from Surrattsville High School in Clinton, Maryland in 1976 and from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.A. in theatre, earning an MFA from the graduate theatre program of New York University.

Harden debuted on Broadway in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America in 1993. For her film work, she won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for Pollock (2000), and was nominated in the same category for Mystic River (2003). She is currently shooting a film called Home, in which she will be playing the role of a mother (to her real daughter, Eulala Scheel) as she did in Felicity: An American Girl Adventure (2005).

Her nephew and niece, Sander and Audrey Harden, died in Queens, New York of severe burns from a house fire, along with her former-sister-in-law, Rebecca. Harden is married to Thaddaeus Scheel, with whom she worked on The Spitfire Grill (1996), and the couple have three children: a daughter, Eulala Grace Scheel, and twins Julitta Dee Scheel and Hudson Harden Scheel. The family lives in Harlem, New York.