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Amy Aquino

Amy Aquino has built a career across stage, film and television, bringing a grounded, direct presence to roles that often call for intelligence and authority. Born on March 20, 1957, in Teaneck, New Jersey, she first acted in junior high school productions, although performing was not initially her academic focus. At Harvard University, Aquino majored in biology. By her final year, acting had claimed more of her attention than her studies, leading her to New York for acting classes while she worked at a law firm. Her path was hardly immediate. After three years in New York without an acting job, Aquino moved to Minneapolis and found her first roles. Following another stretch of rejection, she enrolled at the Yale University School of Drama in 1986 and studied there for three years. Back in New York after Yale, she appeared with Kevin Spacey at Playwrights Horizons, joined the Circle Repertory Company and performed in Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles, the 1989 Tony Award winner for Best Play. Aquino’s first film roles arrived that same year. She played Loretta’s hairdresser in Moonstruck and appeared as Melanie Griffith’s secretary near the end of Working Girl. Television soon became the largest part of her screen career. She was cast as one of the leads in Brooklyn Bridge in 1991, then moved to California after the series received a second season. Her later television work included ER, The Larry Sanders Show and Everybody Loves Raymond. In 1995, her performance as Dr. Joanna “Joey” Diamond in Picket Fences earned a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination. She continued moving between formats, returning off-Broadway for Wasserstein’s Third in 2005 and appearing in Jonathan Tolins’s Secrets of the Trade. On screen, she played Donna in the second season of Being Human and college president Dalley in The Lazarus Effect. Her extended run as Lieutenant Grace Billets in Bosch brought together qualities that recur throughout her work: clarity, composure and an ability to make professional competence feel fully lived-in.