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Laura Ilene Benanti (née Vidnovic; born July 13, 1979)  is an American actress and singer. Over the course of her Broadway career, she has received five Tony Award nominations. She played Louise in the 2008 Broadway revival of Gypsy, winning the 2008 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. Benanti then appeared in the Broadway musical Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in 2010, winning the Drama Desk Award and Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. She played Elsa Schräder in the 2013 NBC television production of The Sound of Music Live! and, in 2015, began playing twin sisters Alura and Astra in the TV series Supergirl. Benanti appeared as Edie Randall in the TBS comedy The Detour from 2017 until the show's cancellation in 2019. Since 2016, she has had a recurring role as First Lady Melania Trump on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Early life
Benanti was born in New York City to Linda Wonneberger, a vocal coach and former actress, and Martin Vidnovic, a Broadway actor and singer. She is of Serbian, German, and Irish heritage. Her parents divorced when she was young. She soon moved to Kinnelon, New Jersey, with her mother and stepfather Salvatore Benanti, a psychotherapist, whose name she took and whom she refers to as her father.

Benanti remembers being "very serious" and "a bit of an ugly duckling" as a child; she was intensely interested in musical theatre, saying she "came out of the womb as a 40-year-old". She was particularly interested in the music of Stephen Sondheim at an early age and distanced herself from other children. In 2008, Benanti told The New York Times that she drew on this loneliness in her portrayal of the neglected Louise in Gypsy. Though her parents refused to let Laura audition for professional theatre, Laura appeared in several high school and community productions, including Evita (as Perón's mistress), Follies (as Young Heidi), and Into the Woods (as Cinderella). At 16, Benanti played the title role in her high school production of Hello, Dolly! and won a Paper Mill Playhouse Rising Star Award for Outstanding Actress in a high school production. She graduated from Kinnelon High School in 1997.