American screen and stage actress who won an Academy Award in 2001 for Best Supporting Actress for her playing Lee Krasner in Pollock and a Tony award for Best Actress in a Play in 2009 for her lead performance in God of Carnage.
Harden made her film debut in 1990 in Miller’s Crossing. Since then she has had a number of roles, usually playing complex women. In 1993, she earned a Theatre World Award for her starring role in the Pulitzer Prize winning play Angels in America.
Since her father was a captain in the US Navy, the Hardens moved often. Harden has three sisters and a brother who were raised very strictly by their military father and homemaker mother. The close family would stage plays on their front porch and, since their mother taught flower arranging, the children spent their spare time doing crafts and hiking as well as play-acting. Harden credits her breakthrough theatre experience to a trip to the Parthenon in Greece where the family witnessed a Greek drama. She was so emotionally involved in the play that she decided then and there to act as her life’s work. From then on, wherever the family went, she studied acting. In Germany, she was cast in a Chekhov play. She then enrolled in the University of Maryland and transferred to the University of Texas at Austin from which she graduated in 1980. Moving to Washington, DC, she waited tables while she obtained parts in theatre, commercials and industrial films.
She moved to New York and enrolled in New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, earning her MFA, and, while performing in a play at Tisch, she was spotted by a talent scout who cast her in Miller’s Crossing.
She met her husband Thaddaeus Scheel, a documentary filmmaker while making The Spitfire Grill in 1995 and they married the following year. In September 1998 their daughter Eulala Grace was born. On 15 December 2003, tragedy struck when her young nephew and niece and their mother, her ex-sister-in-law, were killed in a tragic apartment fire. Four months later, on 22 April 2004 in New York City, she and her husband welcomed the birth of twins, son Hudson Harden Scheel and daughter Julitta Dee Harden Scheel. In February 2012, Harden filed for divorce from Scheel.
It is interesting to note that Harden’s father, brother and ex-husband are all named Thadd(a)eus.
Link to Wikipedia biography