Rise to Fame
Broadway had already handed her two Tony Awards by the time she walked onto a TV set. The first came in 1984 for Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, directed by Mike Nichols; the second for Neil Simon's Rumors. But stage prestige doesn't pay the same way television does, and at 41 she took a calculated risk on a CBS sitcom. The role of Maryann Thorpe on Cybill, a sharp-tongued, martini-swilling divorcee living off a generous settlement, turned out to be the one that made her a household name. She won an Emmy for it, the only cast member who did.
In the Spotlight
Thirteen years as the same character would end most actors' careers on a note of typecasting. She turned it into leverage. As Diane Lockhart on The Good Wife and its spinoff The Good Fight, she collected six Emmy nominations and watched her character become the center of an entire show. Now in her 70s, she's playing the formidable Agnes van Rhijn on The Gilded Age, and she has said it's in her contract to get great clothes, funny lines, and a lover. That sounds like a negotiating position. It's actually a career philosophy.
Side Notes
Polish-immigrant grandparents who performed on stage before she was born might explain why two Tony Awards felt almost inevitable. What's less predictable: she was waitlisted at Juilliard because a tooth gap gave her a lisp on S sounds, fixed it through sheer will, graduated, and didn't discover her singing voice until her mid-twenties. She has no social media, declines to build a personal brand, and describes herself as still protective of her private life. For someone this visible, that's a choice, not an accident.