Early Life and Education
Linney was born in Manhattan. Her mother, Miriam Anderson "Ann" Perse (née Leggett), is a nurse who worked at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and her father, Romulus Zachariah Linney IV, was a well-known playwright and professor (he died on January 15, 2011). Linney's paternal great-great-grandfather was Republican U.S. Congressman Romulus Zachariah Linney. Linney grew up under modest circumstances, living with her mother in a small one-bedroom apartment after her parents' divorce. She has a half-sister, Susan, from her father's second marriage.
She is a 1982 graduate of Northfield Mount Hermon School, an elite preparatory school in New England, for which she currently serves as the chair of the Arts Advisory Council. She then attended Northwestern University before transferring to Brown University, where she studied acting with Jim Barnhill and John Emigh and served on the board of Production Workshop, the university's student theatre group. Linney graduated from Brown with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1986. She went on to study acting at the Juilliard School as a member of Group 19 (1986–1990), which also included Jeanne Tripplehorn. Linney later received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Juilliard when she delivered the school's commencement address in 2009.
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