Kyra Sedgwick

Listen to "Kyra Sedgwick from Edge Of Seventeen" on Spreaker. Kyra Minturn Sedgwick was born in New York City on August 19, 1965, to Patricia Heller, an educational and family therapist, and Henry D. Sedgwick, a venture capitalist. Sedgwick has something of a blue-blood pedigree: Her great-grandfather, Endicott Peabody, founded the famous Groton School, and her cousin, Edie Sedgwick, was the celebrated muse of '60s pop artist Andy Warhol. Sedgwick's parents split when she was a young girl, and at the age of 6 she moved with her mother to her stepfather's home, on New York City's Upper East Side. A fan of the theater and a friend of many Broadway celebrities, Sedgwick's mother encouraged her children to take an interest in the arts. When she was 12, Kyra took to the stage for the first time in a school production of Fiddler on the Roof. As she later remembered, "I just fell in love. For the first time, my soul was free." By the age of 16, Kyra Sedgwick had become a professional actor, landing a recurring role on the soap opera Another World. But she's always viewed soaps as a stepping stone. "I knew I wanted to be a great actor," she said. In the late 1980s, Sedgwick was cast in a 1988 PBS version of the Lanford Wilson play Lemon Sky. On set, she met Kevin Bacon, an actor who had already achieved Hollywood fame for his roles in films such as Footloose and Diner. Sedgwick later admitted to initially finding Bacon repulsively arrogant. "I met him on the first day: He got into the van, he wasn't very friendly, he had an attitude," she recalled. Bacon eventually changed her mind. The couple married in 1988, when Sedgwick was 22. Their first child together, son Travis, was conceived on their honeymoon, and daughter Sosie followed three years later. "If someone had told me that at 22 I was going to meet the man I was going to marry and at 23 I would marry him and have a child, I would have told them they were out of their mind," the actress later said. Sedgwick's career began gaining steam at the time of her marriage, with the actress landing key roles on Broadway—in the Eugene O'Neill play Ah, Wilderness!—and in Hollywood—opposite Tom Cruise in the film Born on the Fourth of July. Sedgwick became even more selective in taking parts after the births of her children. She limited her appearances to small, quality roles, such as the daughter of the characters played by Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward in the 1990 film Mr. & Mrs. Bridge. Sedgwick also starred as Julia Roberts's sister in 1995's Something to Talk About and mixed roles in films like Singles (1992) and Phenomenon (1996) with appearances in indie flicks as well as on television. Sedgwick's career took a new turn when she was cast as the lead on the TNT drama The Closer, which premiered in 2005. She played deputy police chief Brenda Leigh Johnson, a tough Southern cop with a knack for getting perps to confess to their crimes. Though initially reluctant to leave her New York-based family for six months a year to film in Los Angeles, Sedgwick accepted the role. The show, boosted by Sedgwick's winning performance, gained a robust audience as well as critical acclaim. In 2007 and 2009, respectively, Sedgwick won a Golden Globe Award (best actress in a drama television series) and a People's Choice Award (favorite TV drama diva) for her role on the series. In 2010, she was honored with an Emmy Award for lead actress in a drama series—the first major award of her long and varied career. "TV is a very intimate experience for people, and I know that because of the way they react to you when they see you on the street!" Sedgwick said of her new connection with fans. "They say, 'Oh, I loooooooove you!' It's this deep connection and a very intimate one. They feel like they know you; you're in their living room ... And I appreciate being that person that's accessible enough so that people can be intimate with me onscreen and on the street." Sedgwick stayed with The Closer through its seven-season run. After the show ended in 2012, she took on a few film roles: She starred in The Possession, a 2012 horror movie, and the following year had a small part in Kill Your Darlings, starring Daniel Radcliffe. Around this same time, Sedgwick was cast in a starring role alongside Bella Thorne in the thriller Blue Sky. Most recently Sedgwick produced the pilot and is co-executive producer for TNT's drama Proof, which stars Jennifer Beals, Matthew Modine, and Joe Morton.