Maura Tierney
Maura Tierney is an actor, born 1965.
Boston, 1965. Tierney's first credits are the small parts of the early nineties, Cecelia in The Linguini Incident, Noreen in White Sands, Sharon Derns in The Temp, before NewsRadio put her on American television every week from 1995 as Lisa Miller.
Film comedy ran alongside it and mostly asked for the same thing: Audrey Reede in Liar Liar, Daisy Green in Primary Colors, Bridget in Forces of Nature, Caroline in Baby Mama. She is very good at being the person in a scene who has already worked out what is happening and is deciding how much of it to say out loud. That is a difficult note to hold across a whole career, because from the outside it looks like doing nothing.
The two long jobs carry the weight. She played Abby Lockhart on ER from 1999 to 2009, a decade inside one of the biggest network dramas of its era, and Helen Solloway on The Affair from 2014 to 2019, which won her the Golden Globe for best supporting actress in a television series.
Since then she has been a reliable presence in serious films from a supporting position: Karen Barbour in Beautiful Boy, Bernadette in The Report, Doris Von Erich in The Iron Claw, Cathy in Twisters. Fiona McKee in Your Honor and Grace Poe in American Rust keep the television side ticking over.
Movies (20)
- Twisters (2024)
- Primal Fear (1996)
- Liar Liar (1997)
- The Iron Claw (2023)
- Insomnia (2002)
- Beautiful Boy (2018)
- The Report (2019)
- Instinct (1999)
- Semi-Pro (2008)
- Baby Mama (2008)
- Scotland, PA (2001)
- Primary Colors (1998)
- Forces of Nature (1999)
- White Sands (1992)
- The Temp (1993)
- Nature Calls (2012)
- Oxygen (1999)
- The Linguini Incident (1991)
- Welcome to Mooseport (2004)
- Diggers (2007)
TV (9)
Where to start with Maura Tierney
Ten years of ER is a large ask, so start smaller. The Affair holds the award-winning work and gives her the most to do, and it is where a quality people had been half-noticing for twenty years finally got a lead-sized frame around it.
For the comic version, Liar Liar is the easiest watch and Scotland, PA is the strange one, a small-town crime comedy played dry enough to suit her exactly. Then go to the recent character work: The Iron Claw and Beautiful Boy are both about parents absorbing damage, and she is excellent in each without once asking you to notice. NewsRadio remains a genuinely funny sitcom if you would rather start at the beginning.