Melissa Leo | Biography, Movies, TV Shows, & Facts (2024)

Melissa Leo (born September 14, 1960, New York City, New York, U.S.) is an American actress who is known for her naturalistic portrayals of tough, flinty women dealing with difficult situations.

Leo became enamoured with acting when as a small child she was enrolled in the Peter Schumann Bread and Puppet Theater Workshop. She later studied at the Brattleboro Center for the Performing Arts and at London’s Mount View Theatre School. After two years at the State University of New York at Purchase, she left to begin an acting career. Leo won a role on the soap opera All My Children in 1984. She was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award in 1985, and she continued to make occasional appearances on the show until 1988.

Leo’s first movie performances occurred in 1985 in the minor films Always and Streetwalkin’. She later appeared in the horror anthology film Deadtime Stories (1986), the melodrama A Time of Destiny (1988), and Maggie Greenwald’s feminist western The Ballad of Little Jo (1993). She had guest parts on various TV series and was a cast member in the first season of The Young Riders (1989–92). Leo’s breakthrough came with her portrayal of a tough no-nonsense detective—the only woman on the squad—on the first five seasons of the critically acclaimed series Homicide: Life on the Street (1993–99), a role she reprised for the TV movie Homicide: The Movie (2000).

Leo won notice for her performance as the wife of a former convict (played by Benicio Del Toro) in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams (2003). She attracted favourable mention for her role in Tommy Lee Jones’s The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005). Leo’s performance as a single mother in desperate financial straits who becomes a smuggler of illegal refugees in Frozen River (2008) earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for best actress, and she won both the Golden Globe Award and the Oscar for best supporting actress for her merciless portrayal of the domineering mother of an aspiring boxer in The Fighter (2010). Her later films included the action thriller The Equalizer (2014) and its sequel (2018) as well as Oliver Stone’s Snowden (2016), a biopic about an American intelligence contractor who revealed secret information-gathering programs conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA).

Leo continued to appear on television and was nominated for an Emmy Award for her role as a friend of the title character (played by Kate Winslet) in the TV miniseries Mildred Pierce (2011). She was a cast member of the TV series Treme (2010–13), about New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Leo later played the fiendish Nurse Pam in the science fiction TV serial Wayward Pines (2015–16), and she starred in the series I’m Dying up Here (2017–18), about the 1970s stand-up comedy scene in Los Angeles. She later appeared in the miniseries I Know This Much Is True (2020), an adaptation of Wally Lamb’s 1998 novel.