One of the hottest women over 40 on TV nowadays, Mary-Louise Parker is an actress who became a household name for playing Nancy Botwin, a drug-dealing single mother on Showtime’s Weeds. Since leading the cable series, she has received several nominations and has won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in 2006.
Prior to entering the entertainment world, Parker majored in drama at the North Carolina School of the Arts. She then got a job measuring feet at ECCO before landing her first Broadway lead role in 1990 as Rita in Craig Lucas' Prelude to a Kiss, where she won the Clarence Derwent Award for her performance and was nominated for a Tony Award.
Bigger offers eventually came Parker’s way as she was cast in How I Learned to Drive, Proof, and Reckless while simultaneously landing movie roles on Fried Green Tomatoes, Boys on the Side, Bullets Over Broadway and The Client, just to name a few. She also made quite a splash on the small screen for her roles on Ryan’s Hope, Angel’s in America and The West Wing.
Interestingly, Parker’s acting career is just as colorful as her personal life. She gave birth to her first child, William Atticus Parker, in 2004 but not before breaking up with the baby’s father, actor Billy Crudup, while she was seven months pregnant. In December 2006, she dated her Weeds co-star Jeffrey Dean Morgan and then broke up with him in June 2007 though later rekindled and got engaged to him in February 2008 before breaking up with him again two months later. In 2007, Parker also adopted a baby girl from Ethiopia named Caroline "Ash" Aberash Parker.