Laura Linney is a versatile actress with a seemingly endless range. Linney came to film via theatre, a medium in which she has a very close relationship with. Linney is the daughter of prominent playwright Romulus Linney. She grew up working in the theater, both behind the scenes and, in her late teens, on the stage. She attended both Brown University and Juilliard, and she was soon appearing in a number of Broadway productions. She garnered notice for her roles in plays like The Seagull and Six Degrees of Separation, and won particular acclaim for her performance in Hedda Gabler. Linney's big screen career started in 1992 in Nick Nolte’s Lorenzo's Oil. After many other supporting roles, her first high profile role came opposite Jim Carrey in The Truman Show(1998). The actress finally came into her own in 2000, thanks to highly acclaimed independent feature You Can Count On Me by writer/director Kenneth Lonergan. She became an overnight indie sensation, received an Oscar nomination and a near-sweep of the major critics' awards. She has continued to give award nominated performances in independent movies such as Kinsey (2004), The Squid and the Whale (2005) and, most recently, for her performance in the 2007 family drama The Savages. "John Adams is a sprawling HBO miniseries event that depicts the extraordinary life and times of one of America's least understood and most underestimated founding fathers: the second President of the United States, John Adams. Starring Paul Giamatti (Sideways, Cinderella Man, American Splendor) in the title role and Laura Linney (You Can Count on Me, Kinsey) as Adams' devoted wife Abigail, John Adams chronicles the extraordinary life journey of one of the primary shapers of our independence and government whose legacy has often been eclipsed by more flamboyant contemporaries like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin.