Luck and Laura

In her final year at the Juilliard School, Laura Linney was about to experience "Leagues," where each acting student has three terrifying make-or-break minutes to audition for every casting director and agent in New York. As she stood in front of the footlights, Linney suddenly realized why it's called show business: "This was so different from the community, concentration, and time we spent just on the work." Then Linney gave the worst performance of her life. "I'm almost legendary for how bad I was," laughs the towheaded daughter of playwright Romulus Linney. "I'm proud to be the one who bombed at Leagues and still has a career anyway."

With her ability to morph effortlessly from one character to another, Linney's career has quietly ascended. She played the lascivious assistant opposite Kevin Kline in the movie Dave, starred as the wide-eyed protagonist in the PBS miniseries Tales of the City, and received a Drama Desk nomination for playing a sleek, ruthless German journalist in the play Sight Unseen—a performance described by one critic as "spectacularly bitchy." Linney is now appearing on Broadway with Kelly McGillis in Hedda Gabler, and in August co-stars with Steve Martin and Gabriel Byrne in a modern-day version of Silas Marner entitled A Simple Twist of Fate—appropriate for Linney, who thinks that hard work is not the only thing that gets her roles: "I do believe in the fate of it all."

SUSAN KITTENPLAN