Jessica Phyllis Lange (; born April 20, 1949) is an American actress and photographer. With a career spanning five decades, she is known for her roles on stage and screen. Her accolades include two Academy Awards, five Golden Globe Awards, three Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Tony Award, in addition to nominations for a BAFTA Award and a Laurence Olivier Award. Lange is one of few performers to achieve Triple Crown of Acting status.
Lange made her professional film debut in the remake King Kong (1976), which earned her the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year. Lange went on to receive two Academy Awards, her first for Best Supporting Actress as a soap opera star in the comedy Tootsie (1982) and her second for Best Actress playing a bipolar housewife in the drama Blue Sky (1994). Her other Oscar-nominated roles were for Frances (1982), Country (1984), Sweet Dreams (1985), and Music Box (1989). She also acted in films such as All That Jazz (1979), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), Crimes of the Heart (1986), Cape Fear (1991), Rob Roy (1995), Big Fish (2003), and Broken Flowers (2005).
For her roles on television, she received her first Primetime Emmy Award for her portrayal of Big Edie in the HBO movie Grey Gardens (2009). Lange gained new recognition by starring in FX's horror anthology, American Horror Story (2011–2014, 2018, 2026), which earned her two additional Primetime Emmys for its first and third seasons. She was Emmy-nominated for her roles as Blanche DuBois in the CBS film A Streetcar Named Desire (1995), a wife in the HBO television movie Normal (2003), and Joan Crawford in FX the miniseries Feud: Bette and Joan (2017). Lange has also acted in the television films O Pioneers! (1992), and The Great Lillian Hall (2024), as well as the Netflix series The Politician (2019).
On stage, Lange made her Broadway debut in 1992 as Blanche DuBois in that year's revival of Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire. Lange won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for her role as Mary Cavan Tyrone in the 2016 Broadway revival of the Eugene O'Neill play Long Day's Journey into Night. Lange returned to Broadway playing the hardheaded matriarch Phyllis in Paula Vogel's play Mother Play (2024).
As a photographer, Lange has published five books of photography.
She has been a foster parent and holds a Goodwill Ambassador position for UNICEF, specializing in HIV/AIDS in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Russia.
Jessica Phyllis Lange was born on April 20, 1949, in Cloquet, Minnesota. Her father, Albert John Lange, was a teacher and traveling salesman, and her mother, Dorothy Florence (née Sahlman), was a housewife. She has two older sisters, Jane and Ann, and a younger brother, George. Her paternal ancestry is German and Dutch, her maternal ancestry Finnish. Due to the nature of her father's professions, her family moved more than a dozen times to various towns and cities in Minnesota before settling down in her hometown, where she graduated from Cloquet High School.
In 1967, she received a scholarship to study art and photography at the University of Minnesota, where she met and began dating Spanish photographer Paco Grande. After the two married in 1970, Lange dropped out of college to pursue a more bohemian lifestyle, traveling with Grande in a microbus through the United States and Mexico.
The pair moved to Paris, where they drifted apart. While in Paris, Lange studied mime theater under the supervision of Étienne Decroux and joined the Opéra-Comique as a dancer. After returning to the US, she studied acting with Mira Rostova and at HB Studio in New York City.
1976–1989: Breakthrough and acclaim
While living in Paris, Lange was discovered by fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez and became a model for the Wilhelmina modelling agency. In 1973, she returned to the U.S. and began work in New York City as a waitress at the Lion's Head Tavern in Greenwich Village. While modeling, Lange was discovered by Hollywood producer Dino De Laurentiis, who was looking to cast an ingenue for his remake of King Kong.
Lange made her film debut in the 1976 King Kong, beating actresses Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn for the role of damsel-in-distress. Despite the film's success – it was the fifth-highest-grossing film of 1976 and received an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects – it and Lange's performance were widely panned.
But film critic Pauline Kael wrote, "The movie is sparked by Jessica Lange's fast yet dreamy comic style. [She] has the high, wide forehead and clear-eyed transparency of Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey, [and] one liners so dumb that the audience laughs and moans at the same time, yet they're in character, and when Lange says them she holds the eye and you like her, the way people liked Lombard." Lange won the 1976 Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year. She remained a favorite of Kael, who later wrote, "She has a facial structure that the camera yearns for, and she has talent, too."
At the close of the decade, Bob Fosse, whom Lange had befriended and with whom she had carried on a casual romantic affair, cast Lange as Angelique, the Angel of Death, a part he had written for her in his semi-autobiographical film All That Jazz (1979). She was considered for the role of Wendy Torrance in Stanley Kubrick's horror film The Shining (1980) before it went to Shelley Duvall.
Lange began the new decade in the light romp How to Beat the High Cost of Living (1980), co-starring Jane Curtin and Susan Saint James, which received mostly negative reviews and quickly disappeared from theaters. A year later, director Bob Rafelson contacted her about a project he was working on with Jack Nicholson, who had recently auditioned Lange for Goin' South (1978). Rafelson paid Lange a visit in upstate New York, where she was doing summer stock theater. He has recounted how he watched her conversing on the telephone for half an hour before their meeting when he decided he had found the lead for his film. After meeting Lange, he wrote her name down on a piece of paper, placed it in an envelope, and sealed it. He had several meetings and auditions with other actresses (Rafelson had already made his decision, but he feared he had done so too quickly and wanted to make sure his choice was right), finally choosing between Lange and Meryl Streep. In the end, Rafelson offered Lange the lead role opposite Nicholson in his remake of the classic film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981). Upon offering her the part, he gave her the sealed envelope and told her of his early choice. The film received mixed reviews, but Lange was highly praised for her performance.
While editing The Postman Always Rings Twice, Graeme Clifford realized he had found the leading lady for his next film, his first as a director: a biographical film of actress Frances Farmer, whose disillusionment with Hollywood and chaotic family background led her down a tragic path. Filming Frances (1982), which co-starred Kim Stanley and Sam Shepard, was a grueling experience for Lange, who pored over the screenplay scene by scene, making deep and often taxing connections between her life and Farmer's to tap into the well of emotions the role required. By the end of the shoot, she was physically and mentally spent. She decided to take Stanley's advice to do "something light," and accepted a supporting role opposite Dustin Hoffman in Sydney Pollack's Tootsie (1982).
In 1982, Lange became the first performer in 40 years to receive two Academy Award nominations in the same year, for Frances and for Tootsie. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the latter. It became the second-highest-grossing film of 1982 after Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and also scored nine additional Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture. Lange's performance in Tootsie also earned her a Golden Globe, along with awards from the National Society of Film Critics, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Boston Society of Film Critics, and the Kansas City Film Critics Circle. Lange won Best Actress that year at the Moscow International Film Festival for her performance in Frances.