Jessica Phyllis Lange (/læŋ/; born April 20, 1949) is an American actress. She is one of the few performers to achieve the Triple Crown of Acting, having received two Academy Awards, three Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Tony Award.
Lange made her professional film debut in Dino De Laurentiis's 1976 remake of the 1933 action-adventure classic King Kong, which despite receiving mixed reviews, earned her the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year. Lange went on to receive two Academy Awards, her first for Best Supporting Actress as a soap opera star in the comedy Tootsie (1982) and her second for Best Actress playing a bipolar housewife in Blue Sky (1994). Her other Oscar-nominated roles were for Frances (1982), Country (1984), Sweet Dreams (1985) and Music Box (1989). Her other film roles include in All That Jazz (1979), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), Crimes of the Heart (1986), Cape Fear (1991), Rob Roy (1995), and Big Fish (2003).
As her screen career started to decline, Lange transitioned into television starring in O Pioneers! (1992), A Streetcar Named Desire (1995) and Normal (2003). In 2010, Lange won her first Primetime Emmy Award for her portrayal Big Edie in HBO's Grey Gardens (2009). Lange then gained new recognition by starring in FX's horror anthology, American Horror Story (2011–2015, 2018), which earned her two additional Primetime Emmys for its first and third seasons. She received her ninth Emmy Award nomination for her portrayal of Joan Crawford in the miniseries Feud (2017). In 2016, Lange won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for the Broadway revival of Long Day's Journey into Night.
Lange is also a photographer with five published books of photography. She has been a foster parent and holds a Goodwill Ambassador position for UNICEF, specializing in HIV/AIDS in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Russia.
Early life and education
Jessica Phyllis Lange was born on April 20, 1949, in Cloquet, Minnesota. Her father, Albert John Lange, was a teacher and traveling salesman, and her mother, Dorothy Florence (née Sahlman), was a housewife. She has two older sisters, Jane and Ann, and a younger brother, George. Her paternal ancestry is German and Dutch, her maternal ancestry Finnish. Due to the nature of her father's professions, her family moved more than a dozen times to various towns and cities in Minnesota before settling down in her hometown, where she graduated from Cloquet High School.
In 1967, she received a scholarship to study art and photography at the University of Minnesota, where she met and began dating Spanish photographer Paco Grande. After the two married in 1970, Lange dropped out of college to pursue a more bohemian lifestyle, traveling through the United States and Mexico in a microbus with Grande. The pair then moved to Paris, where they drifted apart. While in Paris, Lange studied mime theater under the supervision of Étienne Decroux and joined the Opéra-Comique as a dancer. She later studied acting with Mira Rostova and at HB Studio in New York City.
