Robin Weigert is an American television and film actress. She is best known for portraying Calamity Jane on the television series Deadwood (2004–2006), for which she received a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series in 2004, Ally Lowen in Sons of Anarchy (2010–2013), Dr. Amanda Reisman in Big Little Lies (2017–2019), and Abby in Concussion (2013). She had a small role in HBO's acclaimed miniseries Angels in America in 2003.
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Early life and education
Weigert was born in Washington, D.C. She is the daughter of Dionne Laufman and Wolfgang Oscar Weigert, a psychiatrist. After graduating from Brandeis University in 1991, Weigert attended New York University, earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in the Graduate Acting Program at the Tisch School of the Arts. She is Jewish.
Career
Weigert's theatre work includes Broadway productions of Twelfth Night directed by Nicholas Hytner; and Michael Frayn's Noises Off. In the 2010 Signature Theater Company revival of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, directed by Michael Greif, her performance as the Angel was praised as "full of tenderness and wit" by USA Today. Other theatre credits include Pride's Crossing, A Place at the Table, Hamlet, Arms and the Man, Goodnight Children Everywhere, The Seagull, Madame Melville (Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel Award nominations), as well as Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities at the Mark Taper Forum in 2012, directed by Robert Egan.
After a decade as a stage actress based in New York City, Weigert moved to Los Angeles and has appeared in various films, television shows and mini-series. She is most recognizable from her Emmy-nominated portrayal of the iconic gunslinger Calamity Jane in the television series Deadwood, which ran on HBO from 2004 to 2006. In 2004, Weigert was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for the role. In 2006, she won Hollywood Life magazine's "Breakthrough of the Year" award. In 2019 she reprised the role in Deadwood: The Movie, which was nominated for 8 Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Television Movie.
Weigert played therapists in the box office hit Smile and opposite Nicole Kidman in the much-lauded HBO TV series Big Little Lies, attorneys in the popular cabler Sons of Anarchy and Jay Roach's biographical drama Bombshell, and strippers in Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York and Steven Soderbergh's black-and-white period drama The Good German. She was nominated for a Gotham Award for her portrayal of the central character, a housewife turned prostitute, in the award-winning indie Concussion, and was featured prominently in the Hulu miniseries We Were the Lucky Ones in which she plays the matriarch of a Polish Jewish family that survived the Holocaust. Series regular roles include Dietland for AMC with Julianna Margulies, NBC's Life with Damian Lewis, and CBS' Tracker with Justin Hartley.
In April 2024, David Canfield featured Weigert in the Vanity Fair "Always Great" series with an article titled, "How Robin Weigert Brings Herself to Her Most Indelible Roles".
