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Amy Irving

Amy Irving has built a career that resists being pinned to one kind of performance. Born in Palo Alto on September 10, 1953, she grew up close to the theatre: her father, Jules Irving, was a film and stage director, while her mother, Priscilla Pointer, was an actress. Irving was active in local theatre as a child, attended the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and later trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Her screen career quickly revealed that range. Irving played Sue Snell in Brian De Palma’s Carrie, sharing the film with her mother, and followed it with another De Palma production, The Fury, as Gillian Bellaver. She returned to Sue Snell more than two decades later in The Rage: Carrie 2. Elsewhere, she starred opposite Richard Dreyfuss in The Competition and performed her own country-and-western singing in Honeysuckle Rose, her on-screen singing debut. Irving received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for Yentl, Barbra Streisand’s directorial debut. Crossing Delancey brought her a Golden Globe nomination, while Who Framed Roger Rabbit gave her a different kind of showcase as the singing voice of Jessica Rabbit. Her later film work has included Deconstructing Harry, Traffic, Tuck Everlasting, Thirteen Conversations About One Thing and Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane. Theatre has remained a substantial part of Irving’s work rather than a side note. Her credits include Amadeus, Heartbreak House, Broken Glass, Three Sisters, The Glass Menagerie and Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia. On television, she has appeared in Alias, Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna, House M.D. and Zero Hour. That combination of film, television, theatre, voice acting and singing gives Irving’s career its distinctive shape. In 2023, she added another chapter with Born in a Trunk, her first album, built from ten cover songs connected to her life and career.