| Maura Tierney There are a lot of dramatic actor's out there, but few dramatic actors have a great flair for comedy as well. Maura Tierney, a totally under rated and under used actor is one such example of an individual comfortable with either.
Born February 3, 1965, in Boston, Massachusetts (a fact that would be used later in a NewsRadio episode) Tierney has always had a love of the dramatic arts as far back as she can remember. Her father is a prominent Boston politician and her mother a part-time real estate agent. The family grew up in the prestigious Hyde Park district. But after high school it was time for Maura to pursue her love of acting and she headed into New York University in the mid 80's.
Surprisingly she quit just shy of receiving her diploma at NYU so she could join up with in order to join the neighboring Circle in the Square performance school. She eventually headed out to L.A. where the work is, and found herself cast in pilots and shows that routinely flopped or if you blinked you missed them...however, while working on a failed Ralph Macchio series she met her future husband, fellow actor Billy Morrissette.
The funny thing is how fate turns out and one of her ex-Circle In The Square alumnus would cast her in her first (albeit small) film role, The Linguini Incident. She landed a lead in a small B-movie called Dead Women In Lingerie and more sitcoms and TV work followed but her connection to director Richard Shepard would prove to be available one as he cast her in two more of his films, Oxygen and Mercy. The difference was, by this time Maura had achieved some success of her own, playing bit roles in movies like Primal Fear, The Temp and a role in the ensemble TV sitcom called The Station. Later renamed to NewsRadio and while never exhibiting huge ratings it proved to be Tierney's launching pad and displayed all her talents for broad comedy, and gave her the aura of a new modern Mary Tyler Moore.
As Lisa Miller, Maura held her own in the ensemble piece and soon found other comedy film roles previously not offered to her coming her way. She landed a role in Jim Carrey's Liar Liar, played one of the comedic characters in the political film Primary Colours and despite all this, would do another about face and return to both drama and television in one fell swoop when she signed on for the role of Nurse Abigail 'Abby' Wyczenski Lockhart on ER in 2000.
More recently Tierney landed a role in her husband's directorial debut, the independent comedy Scotland, P.A., in which she plays a would-be fast-food matriarch who will stop at nothing to get to the top. She also has the Robin Williams/Al Pacino thriller Insomnia which could be a really nicely twisted film seeing as it is directed by Christopher Nolan (Memento). Let's just hope she never completely abandons comedy, as Lisa Miller is always the fun kind of person to sit and watch on screen...and no one should be deprived of that kind of fun.
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