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Jane Alexander (born October 28 1939) best known as an American actress, is also a former director of the National Endowment for the Arts and an author.

Biography

Early life

Jane Alexander was born Jane Quigley in Boston, Massachusetts to Thomas B. Quigley, who was of Irish and German descent, and Ruth Elizabeth Pearson, whose family had migrated from Nova Scotia, Canada to South Boston. (Alexander's maternal grandmother, Cora Westhaver, was born in Mader's Cove, Nova Scotia.)

Thomas Quigley grew up in North Platte, Nebraska, but moved permanently to Boston when he received a scholarship to Harvard University at age sixteen. The eldest of three siblings, Alexander comfortably grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, with her father working as a doctor and her mother as a nurse. Alexander, pp 1-16

Alexander graduated from Beaver Country Day School, which was at that time an all girls school, in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. While there she discovered her love of acting. Encouraged by her father, however, to go to college rather than attempt going straight into an acting career, she attended Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, where she concentrated in theater, but also studied mathematics with an eye toward computer programming, in the event of a failed acting career.

As a college student, she spent her junior year studying at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland where she participated in the Edinburgh University Dramatic Society. The experience, together with apparently good reviews of her performances, solidified her determination to continue acting. Alexander, pp 1-16

She met her first husband, Robert Alexander, in the early 1960's. Both were living in New York pursuing acting careers. They had one son, Jace, born in 1964, and, the couple divorced a few years later. Alexander had been acting regularly in various regional theaters before meeting Ed Sherin, a noted producer and the man she describes as her "life partner", in Washington, DC.

Sherin, then artistic director at Arena Stage in Washington, cast Alexander as Saint Joan. Two years later, both by then good friends and divorced from their respective spouses, Alexander and Sherin became romantically as well as professionally linked and eventually married in 1975. The couple have four children: Alexander's son, Jace; and Sherin's three sons, Tony, Geoffrey, and Jon, from his previous marriage. Alexander, pp 1-16

In 1967, Alexander played the female lead, Eleanor Backman, in the original performance of The Great White Hope by Howard Sackler at Arena Stage. Like her co-star, James Earl Jones, she went on to play the part both on Broadway and in the film version (1970). From that point on, she has enjoyed a remarkably successful career as an actress on stage, in film, and on television.

Career

Prior to her role in The Great White Hope, Alexander performed for several years at the American Shakespeare Festival Theater in Stratford, Connecticut (including a fine performance in the title role of Major Barbara). In 1969, after originating the role of Jefferson's love interest at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., Alexander debuted on Broadway in The Great White Hope for which she won a Tony Award as Supporting or Featured Actress—Play and took it to Hollywood, where she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress.

She received other nominations for All the President's Men (1976) and Kramer vs. Kramer (1979). Other stage credits inlcude Shadowlands and The Sisters Rosenweig, in which one of her co-stars was Madeline Kahn. She played Eleanor Roosevelt in two television productions, Eleanor and Franklin and Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years. Other television movies include Playing for Time, co-starring Vanessa Redgrave with a screenplay by Arthur Miller; Calamity Jane; Malice in Wonderland; Blood & Orchids; In Love and War; and Daughter of the Streets. In 1983, she received another Oscar nomination for her work in the post-nuclear war film Testament which co-starred William Devane and depicted the harrowing cost of nuclear war looked at from the intimate perspective of one California family.;

In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed her chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, the organization that had partially funded to the original production of The Great White Hope at Arena Stage in 1967.NYT Alexander moved to Washington, DC and served as chairman of the NEA until 1997. Her book, Command Performance: an Actress in the Theater of Politics (2000), describes her challenging and difficult experience heading the NEA at a time when the 104th U.S. Congress, headed by Newt Gingrich, unsuccessfully strove to shut down the Endowment.Alexander; flyleaf

Returning to acting after her time in Washington, Alexander won an Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actress in a TV Movie/Miniseries, for her role as Sara Roosevelt in HBO's Warm Springs in 2005. She currently lives with her husband north of New York City.

References

• Alexander, Jane. Command Performance: an Actress in the Theater of Politics. PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Book Group; New York, NY, 2000. ISBN 1-89162-060-1.
• NYT (The New York Times). Lawson, Carol. "Howard Sackler, 52, Playwright Who Won Pulitzer Prize, Dead," October 15, 1982. accessed September 8, 2006. (NOTE: payment required for full article, if retrieved online)
• IMDb:
• IBDb:

Notes

External links

• Jane Alexander Downstage Center interview at American Theatre Wing

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