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Mary-Louise Parker: The Makings of a Star: The 1990s
Parker maintained a strong theater presence in the early 1990s, but also maintained her reputation on the big screen, starring with
Susan Sarandon and
Tommy Lee Jones in The Client (1994); with
John Cusack in Bullets Over Broadway
(1994); and then playing an AIDS sufferer in Boys on the Side (1995), with
Drew Barrymore and
Whoopi Goldberg. She followed this up with a movie adaptation of yet another Craig Lucas play, Reckless (1995), alongside
Mia Farrow and then in in Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady (1996) which also starred
Nicole Kidman,
Viggo Mortensen,
Christian Bale,
John Malkovich and
Barbara Hershey. In 1997, she appeared alongside
Matthew Modine in Tim Hunter's The Maker.
Parker did not become an instant household name, but rather a darling of the critics. Her theater career continued to flourish when she appeared in Mark Brokaw's 1997 critical smash How I Learned To Drive, with
David Morse. After several independent film releases, she appeared in Let The Devil Wear Black and then a much-lauded role in 1999's The Five Senses.
In 2001, Parker appeared alongside Len Cariou and
Anne Heche in David Auburn's Proof on Broadway, and among the praise showered on her was the much-coveted Tony award. However, Parker again lost out when the play was made into a film and the role was given to
Gwyneth Paltrow. But whatever her theatrical aspirations, she would leave the stage for three years as her profile soared and she found roles wherever she looked: among them, the Silence of the Lambs
prequel Red Dragon; a 2002 television movie based on the life of FBI spy-turned-Soviet informer, Robert Hanssen (played by
William Hurt); and playing a struggling screenwriter alongside Martin Donovan in Pipe Dream (2002).
Next up was a guest role on the
Rob Lowe/
Martin Sheen NBC drama, The West Wing, as women's rights activist Amelia 'Amy' Gardner, which soon became a recurring role. Beginning in 2001, her character became Chief of Staff to the First Lady (played by
Stockard Channing), became a love interest for neurotic Deputy Chief of Staff Joshua Lyman (played by
Bradley Whitford), and provided another female voice in a show publicly criticised for its lack of high-level political women (with the exception of
Allison Janney's press secretary C.J. Cregg). For this role, Parker was nominated for an Emmy, and a Screen Actors Guild award.
However in 2003, after the show's fourth season, creator and head writer
Aaron Sorkin left the show along with his top director Thomas Schlamme. While some fans believed that this destroyed the show, and others enjoyed it, one thing was certain: the show's style had definitely changed. Around this time, Parker fell pregnant and her character was written out of the series after five episodes of the fifth season. She was later to return in 2005.
In November 2003, she split with long-time boyfriend
Billy Crudup, after a seven year relationship which began when they met in a 1996 theater reprisal of the
Marilyn Monroe film Bus Stop.
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