Jessica Lange's Real Name: Jessica Lange

Quick answer: Jessica Lange is known professionally and in major reference works as Jessica Lange. Encyclopaedia Britannica records that she was born on April 20, 1949, in Cloquet, Minnesota, and that she is an American actress known for her versatility. She won Academy Awards for Tootsie and Blue Sky (Britannica).

Real name and early life

The Library of Congress heading is "Lange, Jessica," without a birth year in the authorized label. Britannica supplies the date and the Cloquet, Minnesota, birthplace. A fuller form, Jessica Phyllis Lange, appears in some online databases but is not independently confirmed in the sources used for this page, so the public name is used in the title. Britannica says she attended the University of Minnesota on an art scholarship but dropped out to travel, lived in Paris, where she studied mime, and then settled in New York City. A sometime model, she was cast by producer Dino De Laurentiis in his remake of King Kong (1976).

Career highlights

The King Kong debut was ridiculed by critics, and Britannica says she did not work again for more than two years. After several small roles she attracted attention in another remake, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981). Her double breakthrough came in 1982: she starred as Frances Farmer in Frances and played a soap opera actress in Tootsie, earning Academy Award nominations for both films and the award for best supporting actress for Tootsie. She later received Oscar nominations for Country (1984), the Patsy Cline biopic Sweet Dreams (1985), and Music Box (1989), and she won the Academy Award for best actress for Blue Sky (1994), a prize presented in 1995. Later films include Cousin Bette (1998), Titus (1999), Big Fish (2003), and Broken Flowers (2005), opposite Bill Murray. In 2003 she appeared in the television movie Normal. In 2009 she appeared in the television movie Grey Gardens as "Big Edie" Bouvier Beale, opposite Drew Barrymore, and won an Emmy Award for the performance. She continued in television with American Horror Story, which debuted in 2011; in the first season, later subtitled Murder House, she played an intrusive neighbor in a haunted mansion. On stage she made her Broadway debut in 1992 as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, after a 1985 television Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and later starred in a West End Long Day's Journey into Night (2000–01).

Name notes for searchers

Jessica Lange is the name used in Britannica and the Library of Congress heading. Searchers looking for the Oscar winner from Tootsie or Blue Sky, or for Frances Farmer in Frances, are usually aiming at the same person.