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Amy Brenneman

Amy Brenneman has built a career around characters who must think their way through pressure, whether the setting is a police precinct, a courtroom, a family drama or something stranger. Born in New London, Connecticut, in 1964 and raised in Glastonbury, she began performing in school and local theatre as a teenager. At Harvard University, where she studied comparative religion, she co-founded the Cornerstone Theatre Company and travelled with the group for several years after graduating in 1987. Her first major television role arrived with NYPD Blue, playing mob-connected officer Janice Licalsi across the show’s first season and the opening episodes of its second. The performance earned her Emmy nominations in 1994 and 1995, while also establishing the grounded intensity that would run through much of her later work. Brenneman moved into films including Bye Bye Love, Casper and Michael Mann’s Heat in 1995, followed by the thrillers Daylight and Fear. She took the lead in the independent drama Nevada, appeared in Neil LaBute’s Your Friends & Neighbors and later worked twice with director Rodrigo García, in Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her and Nine Lives. Her film roles also include The Jane Austen Book Club, 88 Minutes, The Face of Love and Words and Pictures. Television, however, has given Brenneman some of her most substantial parts. After a recurring role as Faye Moskowitz on Frasier, she created, executive produced and starred in Judging Amy. Inspired by her mother’s experience as a Connecticut Superior Court judge, the series cast Brenneman as a divorced single mother serving as a family court judge. It ran for six seasons and 138 episodes. She later played psychiatrist Violet Turner throughout Private Practice, appeared as Mary of Guise in Reign and joined HBO’s The Leftovers opposite Justin Theroux. Across those varied projects, Brenneman’s work has remained especially suited to complicated adults: capable, vulnerable and rarely reducible to a single neat impression.