American actress, very skinny with a wide mouth, expressive, who was a major star of the late ’90s with her lead role in comedy-drama TV series Ally McBeal (1997–2002) playing a ditsy but capable Boston lawyer. Flockhart has won a Golden Globe Award and Screen Actors Guild Award, and been nominated three times for Emmy Awards.
On TV, she played Kitty Walker in the drama series Brothers & Sisters (2006–2011) and Cat Grant in the superhero drama series Supergirl (2015–2019). Her movies include the comedy film The Birdcage (1996), the romantic comedy film A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999), and the drama film Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her (2000).
A serious Broadway actress, she copped a Tony nomination in 1997 for her role in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, and planned a career in drama, hardly aiming for a light hearted, off-beat TV series.
In 1993 her primary role was that of the starving artist, living on canned ravioli and making $400 for eight weeks work off-Broadway. When she took the role of Ally, she figured that at the least, it would give her a financial cushion. Instead, it made her a star. Fan mail poured in and she began to find herself increasingly included in the ranks of the in-crowd.
Flockhart had a nomadic childhood, moving with her folks and older brother from Illinois to Minnesota, New York and New Jersey as her dad climbed the corporate ladder. After graduating from Rutgers University, she settled in New York and made theater her home. She played in The Glass Menagerie, Sophistry, and All For One, but also had barren periods, making the rounds and scrounging for parts on daytime soaps. Jobs also turned up in Hollywood such as the HBO movie The Secret Life of Mary-Margaret (1992) and the Showtime film Drunks (1996).
On the set she is intense, pacing the floor in a trancelike state memorizing her lines. “I’ve had to let go and not be so hard on myself,” she said. At the 1998 Oscar night, when Flockhart appeared in a dress that showed skin stretched over her bones, the buzz dwelt on the possibility of anorexia. She indignantly denied having an eating problem.
Flockhart does not give her age to the media. Her name, Calista, came from her great-grandmother; it means “most beautiful” in Greek. She, as Ally once said, would like to marry and have children, but that part of her success had not yet come together until 10 January 2001, when she announced that she had adopted a baby boy, Liam, not waiting for a marriage partner. She met the biological mother, a medical technician and mother of four, in October 2000 and prepared a nursery in the four-bedroom Cape Cod-style home she shared with her nine-year-old terrier mix in Los Angeles, California.
On 20 January 2002, Flockhart met Harrison Ford after spilling a drink on him at the Golden Globes ceremony and they moved into couple territory. They married on 15 June 2010 in New Mexico.
Link to Wikipedia biography