Please Rewind Talent Wall

Ann Magnuson

Ann Magnuson has built a career around the pleasure of never staying in one lane. An actor, performance artist and singer, she brings the same playful, off-center sensibility to film and television that shaped her early work in New York’s downtown scene. Born in Charleston, West Virginia, on January 4, 1956, Magnuson graduated from Denison University in 1978 and moved to New York City. By the turn of the decade, she was working as a DJ and performer at the Mudd Club and Club 57, the latter a gathering place for artists including Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf. Her creations included Anoushka, a Soviet lounge singer who performed mock-Russian versions of pop standards. She also sang with the all-woman percussion group Pulsallama and later fronted the satirical heavy-metal band Vulcan Death Grip. That mix of comedy, music and performance would remain central to her work. Magnuson made her film debut in Vortex in 1981. Her screen roles have often benefited from her ability to make a supporting character feel unusually specific: she played David Bowie’s victim in The Hunger, Mel Gibson’s ex-wife in Tequila Sunrise, a madam in Tank Girl, Alan’s mother in Small Soldiers and a sharp-edged real estate agent in Panic Room. She also appeared in Clear and Present Danger and Love at Large. On television, Magnuson played magazine editor Catherine Hughes in Anything But Love from 1989 to 1992, opposite Jamie Lee Curtis and Richard Lewis. Later appearances ranged from Frasier and CSI: Miami to Wanda at Large. In 2018 she joined The Man in the High Castle as Caroline Abendsen, and she played Fleet Admiral Kirsten Clancy in the first season of Star Trek: Picard. Alongside her screen career, Magnuson has continued creating one-woman shows, cabaret performances and music. Pretty Songs & Ugly Stories became both a touring stage show and her second solo album, while Back Home Again (Dreaming of Charleston) brought her performance work back to the city where she began.