Rise to Fame
Two Broadway shows running simultaneously, both directed by Mike Nichols, and she was still a teenager. The Real Thing and Hurlyburly opened the same 1984 season, with Nixon in both casts alongside Jeremy Irons and William Hurt. Two decades of stage work followed before Sex and the City made her a household name as Miranda Hobbes, the Type-A lawyer who ran circles around the other three. The 2004 Emmy confirmed what theater audiences already knew.
In the Spotlight
Running against Cuomo in the 2018 Democratic primary, she got 34%, enough to reframe her public identity from celebrity activist to actual candidate. Back on screen, she returned to Miranda for And Just Like That... as executive producer. The Little Foxes move, where she and Laura Linney alternated the lead and featured roles at every performance, earned her a second Tony in 2017. Between cable, The Gilded Age, and Marjorie Prime on Broadway in 2024, the theater never stopped being the point.
Side Notes
Her wife, Christine Marinoni, was a community organizer she met at a New York City public school reform rally in 2001. Nixon had spent the previous 15 years with a man. The pivot was public: she got engaged at a same-sex marriage rally before the law allowed it, then married in 2012. A Grammy sits alongside the Tonys and Emmys, awarded in 2009 for co-narrating the audiobook of An Inconvenient Truth. Two Tonys, two Emmys, one Grammy, one governor's race, and she still finds time for hunger strikes.