Jane Alexander
Jane Alexander was born and raised in Brookline, Massachusetts, and attended Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Edinburgh. She has appeared in more than 70 films and television productions, including Academy Award-nominated performances in The Great White Hope, All the President’s Men, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Testament. Her television credits include Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years, Calamity Jane, Malice in Wonderland, Law and Order, The Blacklist, Modern Love, and Emmy Award-winning performances in Warm Springs and Playing for Time. She has performed in more than 100 plays, among them The Great White Hope, The Visit, The Sisters Rosensweig, and Grand Horizons. She has appeared on Broadway, London’s West End, and in regional theaters from Atlanta to Los Angeles, garnering eight Tony Award nominations and one Tony Award, an Obie Award, a Drama Desk Award, and a Theatre World Award. She has also been inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.
Ms. Alexander is an internationally celebrated wildlife champion and conservationist who believes that humanity’s highest calling is to create a world in which every person and all creatures can thrive. She has served on the boards of Audubon, Wildlife Conservation Society, American Bird Conservancy, and American Birding Association, and on the advisory boards of BirdLife International, Panthera, and Centre ValBio, among others. She has also served as a New York State Parks commissioner. She is active as a volunteer in the Audubon Christmas Bird Count and the North American Breeding Bird Survey and as a Nova Scotia Piping Plover guardian. In 2012, The Indianapolis Prize recognized her dedication to global wildlife conservation by presenting her with the inaugural Jane Alexander Global Wildlife Ambassador Award, which is now presented biennially to a prominent conservation advocate. Boreal forest conservation and supporting Indigenous leadership in conservation worldwide are two of her strong interests.
From 1993 to 1997, Ms. Alexander served as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, during which time she staunchly defended the agency’s mission, its budget, and its grantees against a fiscal onslaught and moral panic instigated by Congress.
As a teenager, Ms. Alexander was drawn to theater companies like the Poet’s Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she admired Olympia Dukakis on stage, and the many house productions put on at Harvard University. She began acting in community theater, in school productions, and in summer stock from the age of 15, knowing that this was the world she wanted to make her life’s work.
Of her early days in New York, she writes, “I was lucky because shortly after I arrived in New York City in 1961, I was cast in an Off-off-Broadway production of Love for Love with a charismatic young Frank Langella as the lead, Valentine. My first Off-Broadway play soon followed. I stood by for the role of Lina Szczepanowska in George Bernard Shaw’s witty treatise on the “modern woman,” Misalliance, at the Sheridan Square Playhouse with the lovely Frances Sternhagen as Hypatia. Lina was a tour-de-force character whom I got to play a number of times. She has one of the longest monologues Shaw ever wrote for a woman, and here I was performing it at the tender age of 22. The hardest part was picking up one of the hefty male characters afterward and exiting with him over my shoulder every night in a fireman’s carry. Still, I must have acquitted myself well enough because I was offered work off Broadway, on Broadway and in regional theaters from then on.”
Ms. Alexander lives in Nova Scotia, where she cherishes the many creatures that call the seas, bogs, and forests home. She has three sons and six grandchildren, and she continues her acting and advocacy.