Nearly 30 years of presence in Hollywood
Achievements

Nearly 30 years of presence in Hollywood

Elizabeth Ann Perkins is an American actress of Greek descent who fascinates the audience with her talent. Her film roles have included Big, The Flintstones, Miracle on 34th Street, About Last Night…, and Avalon and she is also well known for her role as Celia Hodes in the Showtime TV series Weeds.

Elizabeth Ann Perkins was born on November 18, 1960, in the borough of Queens, New York and was raised in Vermont. Her mother, Jo Williams, was a concert pianist and drug treatment counsellor and her father, James Perkins, was a businessman, farmer, and writer. Her paternal grandparents were Greek immigrants who anglicized their surname from Pisperikos to Perkins when they immigrated from Thessaloniki to the United States.

In 1981, Perkins studied acting at Chicago’s Goodman School of Drama at DePaul University for three years, then launched her professional career with a co-starring gig in the touring company of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs. She returned to New York in the spring of 1984 to make her Broadway debut as a replacement in the Simon play. As a stage actress, she has trod the boards with Playwrights Horizon, the Ensemble Studio, The New York Shakespeare Festival and, back in Chicago, with the Steppenwolf Theater.

Her first major film role was in David Mamet’s “Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” which was turned into a Rob Lowe/Demi Moore star vehicle retitled “About Last Night…” (1986). Perkins sparkled as the grown woman interested in Tom Hanks in “Big” (1988). In 1991, she starred with Kevin Bacon in “He Said, She Said” (1991). Her biggest box-office hit has proven to be “The Flintstones” (1994), in which she portrayed Wilma.

Perkins play Tom Berenger’s foe in Alan Rudolph’s “Love at Large” and gain critical acclaim for her performance as the troublesome wife of Aidan Quinn in the ensemble of Barry Levinson’s “Avalon”.

She went on to give fine acting in 1991′s “The Doctor”, in which played a terminal cancer patient who makes William Hurt sentient of his heartlessness. The famous actress then played in “Indian Summer” (1993), in the remake of Miracle on 34th Street (1994) and the ensemble “Moonlight and Valentino” (1995). The same year also found Perkins on the stage in a Los Angeles production of John Patrick Shanley’s “Four Dogs and a Bone”, directed by movie director Larry Kasdan.

After this, Perkins, who made her TV movie bow in 1993′s based-on-fact drama “For Their Own Good”, concentrated more on television. She starred as a Catholic woman who adopted her ex-employer’s son to protect him from the Holocaust in the “Mamusha” segment of Showtime’s “Rescuers: Stories of Courage: Two Women and a mother” who finds out her late son has been replicated in the NBC film “Cloned” (both 1997).

She starred in the NBC comedy series “Battery Park” (2000) and HBO’s “If These Walls Could Talk 2” (2000). Her other TV work includes “Babilonia 2000” (1999), “Rescuers: Stories of Courage: Two Women” (1997) and “From the Earth to the Moon” (1998) in an episode directed by Sally Field.

Since 2005, Perkins has played Celia Hodes, a psychotic, ambitious and highly entertaining PTA mother, alongside Mary-Louise Parker and Justin Kirk on the Showtime series “Weeds”. Thanks to her work on “Weeds”, Perkins has received two Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actress in a TV Series, Miniseries or Made for TV Motion Picture (in 2006 and 2007). She has also been nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. At a screening of the season 2 finale of “Weeds”, at the Museum of TV and Radio on October 25, 2006, Perkins said that she considers Celia Hodes her favourite role in her career because she is so different from the characters she is usually cast as.

In 2005, she appeared next to Naomi Watts in the suspense thriller “The Ring Two”.

She was also the voice of Nemo’s mother in the film “Finding Nemo”.

In 2012-2013, she worked on her diabetes campaign called Diabetes Co-Stars and starred in the ABC comedy series “How to Live with Your Parents (for the Rest of Your Life)” as Elaine Green.

LEAVE YOUR COMMENT