An Actress Who's As Great as the Sum of Her Parts

Her stride lengthens, her eyes glisten, she seems filled with a giddy -- dare we say geeky? -- effervescence.

"It's just my favorite place in the world to be," she says, settling into a seat in the Milton Theatre upstairs. She's tickled by the "ghost light" illuminating the stage, asks the staff if there's a "black box" theater, wants to know about the "intimacy of the performance spaces." The theater "taught me much of what I believe. My belief system. It taught me about problem solving and honesty and discipline and creativity and imagination. About true and false. It taught me all the things that I hold really dear."

At 10, her father found her a summer job hanging lights and building props at New Hampshire's New London Barn Playhouse.

"Keep her there for two days," she recalls her father telling the playhouse director. "Work her to death and she'll come home."

Linney liked the work so much she came back for three consecutive summer stints, pulling 15-hour days and feeling "happy, happy, happy."

Did she ever come home again? "No," says Linney. "I found home."

Linney, whose parents were divorced when she was an infant, was raised in Manhattan by her mother, a nurse, who always told her "to never be afraid to be myself. As hokey as that sounds, it's slogans like that that do give you a bit of a backbone."

Her father was always available for dramaturgical consultation during her college years. "I could call him on the phone and say, 'I do not understand Ibsen.' And I would get these gorgeous, fantastic lectures on the other side of the phone."

After graduating from Juilliard, Linney assumed she'd work an apprenticeship in the sticks before returning, one triumphant day, to New York. But when she was offered the role of understudy for Tess in John Guare's "Six Degrees of Separation" on Broadway, she stayed in her home town. And after getting minor parts in 1992's "Lorenzo's Oil" and 1993's "Dave," Linney realized a film career -- particularly the sort of character-driven indie movies built around performance -- was possible, too.

"It's been very strange that film has become such a big part of my life," says Linney. "Because that is time I thought I'd be spending in the theater."

Linney's prodigious output has turned more heads on the street in recent years, she acknowledges, a relatively new -- and still strange -- development. "I think it's just an accumulation of a lot of work," says Linney, ruefully, as if trying to explain why she was singled out for a tax audit.

So which roles are people recognizing her from?