Laura Innes
Laura Innes is an actor, born 1957.
Kerry Weaver is one of the great difficult bosses in American television, and Innes played her on ER from 1995, work that brought two Primetime Emmy nominations. The part is worth thinking about. Weaver is an administrator inside a show about heroic clinicians, the person enforcing budgets and rotas while everyone around her is saving lives, and the writing never softens her. Innes made her somebody you argued with rather than somebody you booed, which meant playing competence as a personality trait instead of a virtue.
She was directing at the same time. In 2001 she received a third Primetime Emmy nomination for directing Shibboleth, an episode of The West Wing, and directing has been half of her working life ever since. Actors who move behind the camera on a long-running show usually do it for variety; she did it well enough to be nominated for an episode of another network's flagship drama.
Her acting roles since have leaned toward authority with something withheld: Sophia Maguire in The Event, Karen in Colony, Lynne Birkhead in How to Get Away with Murder from 2018 to 2020, Senator Thurman in Silo. The earliest credit on this page is Jody in The Fury, in 1978, which puts more than four decades between the first entry and the most recent one.
Movies (8)
TV (8)
Where to start with Laura Innes
ER is the whole thing, really, and Kerry Weaver is the reason: a character introduced to be resented and then gradually made into the most interesting adult in the building. It is an enormous number of hours, so treat the middle seasons as the sample.
Silo is the best of the recent work, and Senator Thurman is exactly what her hospital years prepared her for, a person with power who explains almost nothing. The Event is the ambitious network science fiction experiment that never quite worked, with her at the centre of it. How to Get Away with Murder and Colony are supporting runs, both solid. Deep Impact is the big studio credit, and The Fury is the 1978 curiosity that opens the list.