Julianna Margulies | Biography, TV Shows, & Facts (2024)

Julianna Margulies (born June 8, 1966, Spring Valley, New York, U.S.) is an American actress known for her roles on the television shows ER (1994–2000; 2009) and The Good Wife (2009–16).

Margulies, the daughter of an advertising executive and a dance teacher, spent most of her childhood living in Sussex, England, and in Paris. She returned to the United States for high school and then earned a B.A. (1989) from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied art history and appeared in theatrical productions. Margulies supported herself by working in the restaurant industry as she sought an acting career in New York City. She made her film debut playing a small part in the 1991 Steven Seagal vehicle Out for Justice. Guest roles in TV shows followed, among them , Murder, She Wrote, and Homicide: Life on the Street.

In 1994 Margulies was cast in what was intended to be a one-time role as a suicidal emergency-room head nurse in the pilot episode of the medical drama series ER. Focus groups were so taken with Margulies, however, that producers decided to make her a part of the regular cast. As ER’s Carol Hathaway, Margulies won immediate plaudits. She earned a 1995 Emmy Award for supporting actress in a drama series for the show’s first season (1994–95) and received Emmy nominations in each of the following five seasons. She also won six Screen Actors Guild (SAG) awards. During the six seasons that Margulies embodied Hathaway, ER ranked no lower than number four in viewership ratings.

Margulies continued to appear in movies throughout her run on ER, and in 2000 she decided to leave the TV show in hopes of diversifying her career. Her film and stage roles, however, continued to be eclipsed by her television engagements. She received a Golden Globe nomination for her portrayal of Morgaine in a 2001 TV movie based on the 1982 novel The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley and another nomination for her leading role in a two-part political thriller miniseries, The Grid (2004). In 2006–07 she appeared as a heroin-addicted real-estate agent in several episodes of the final season of the acclaimed TV series The Sopranos. In 2008 Margulies played the role of troubled defense attorney Elizabeth Canterbury in Canterbury’s Law, but that series was canceled after six episodes.

The character of Alicia Florrick in The Good Wife finally provided Margulies with a part that was at least as memorable as that of Carol Hathaway, and the string of acting accolades resumed. In that series, which ran from 2009 to 2016, Margulies, playing the wife of a disgraced Chicago politician caught in a sex scandal, goes to work at a law firm in order to support her children. Margulies’s understated performance let the character’s intelligence and conflicted emotions shine through and allowed her quiet reserve to speak volumes. She won a Golden Globe Award for best actress in a television drama in 2010, took SAG awards for female actor in a drama series in 2010 and 2011, and won Emmys for outstanding lead actress in a drama in 2011 and 2014.

After appearing in several little-seen films, Margulies returned to television in 2018, portraying a magazine editor in the series Dietland; the show was canceled after one season. She then starred in the miniseries The Hot Zone (2019), about an ebola crisis in the United States in 1989. In 2020 she appeared in the series Billions, cast as a sociology professor and writer. The following year Margulies joined season two of The Morning Show, an Apple TV+ series about a fictional television program. Margulies’s memoir, Sunshine Girl: An Unexpected Life, was released in 2021.