Christine Baranski, the Gilded Age actress who waited until 74 to play the West End

Christine Baranski

Photo: iDominick / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 2, 1952 Buffalo, New York, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Mamma Mia!, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
Awards	2 Tony Award · Emmy · 3 SAG Award · Drama Desk

Christine Baranski has a story she tells against herself. People assume she is the women she plays: the litigator who silences a conference room with one raised eyebrow, the Manhattan widow who treats a dinner seating plan as an act of war. Anyone who has watched the Buffalo Bills with her, she likes to say, knows otherwise. It gets loud. The polish is a craft, built over a lifetime on the stage, and this autumn she carried it somewhere she had never worked before: the West End, in a Noël Coward comedy about an actress who cannot stop performing.

The coincidence is hard to miss. In London she plays Judith Bliss, a retired star who misses the applause so badly that she turns her own houseguests into an audience. In New York her Agnes van Rhijn has just returned to HBO in a new season of The Gilded Age, scheming to win back the social standing she lost. Two women who refuse to leave the stage, played by an actress who has said out loud that the London role might be her last in the theatre.

A Polish family from Buffalo

The theatre was in the family before she was. Her grandparents had been stage actors in Poland before emigrating to the United States, and her father, Lucien Baranski, edited a Polish-language newspaper in Buffalo, New York, the city where Christine Jane Baranski was born on May 2, 1952. He died when she was a small child. She grew up in Cheektowaga, a heavily Polish and Catholic suburb, was class president and salutatorian at Villa Maria Academy, and then went to Juilliard, graduating from its drama division in 1974.

New York theatre made her before cameras did. After a Broadway debut in Hide & Seek in 1980, she was cast as Charlotte in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, which brought her the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play in 1984. She won the same Tony again in 1989 for Neil Simon’s farce Rumors. In the early nineties she played Chloe in the original production of Terrence McNally’s Lips Together, Teeth Apart, which earned her a second Drama Desk Award.

The scene-stealer cinema kept at the edge of the frame

Television found her in the middle of the nineties. As Maryann Thorpe, the hard-drinking, sharp-tongued best friend in the CBS sitcom Cybill, she won the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 1995. Film followed the same pattern. She was the long-absent birth mother of Robin Williams‘ son in Mike Nichols’ The Birdcage, Martha May Whovier in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the sob-sister reporter Mary Sunshine in Chicago, and Tanya, Meryl Streep‘s thrice-divorced former bandmate, in Mamma Mia! and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. Rob Marshall cast her as Cinderella’s stepmother in Into the Woods.

That list is also the problem with how her career is usually told. Cinema used an actress with two Tonys for farce as a scene-stealing accessory: the sophisticated friend, the snob, the disapproving mother, the stepmother, almost never the person the film was about. The awards record tells a similar story. Her only Primetime Emmy is the one from Cybill; since then the Television Academy has nominated her again and again, six years in a row for the same drama role, without handing her the statuette. The lazy version of Baranski is a woman who plays elegance. The more accurate one is a comic technician whose timing was mistaken for temperament, and who had to wait for television to give her a part with real authority.

Diane Lockhart and Agnes van Rhijn

That part was Diane Lockhart. Robert and Michelle King cast her as the senior partner of a Chicago law firm in The Good Wife, which ran on CBS from 2009 to 2016, and the role brought her those six consecutive Emmy nominations. When the Kings built the spin-off The Good Fight, Diane moved to the centre, and Baranski led the show until 2022, picking up a Golden Globe nomination for its fifth season. At the same time she was making guest visits to The Big Bang Theory as Beverly Hofstadter, Leonard’s coolly clinical mother, a recurring role across 16 episodes that produced four more Emmy nominations.

Since 2022 she has been Agnes van Rhijn in Julian Fellowes’ The Gilded Age, an old-money matriarch in 1880s New York trading barbs with her sister Ada, played by Cynthia Nixon, and with Carrie Coon‘s new-money Bertha Russell. The fourth season premiered on HBO and HBO Max on November 1, 2026, and HBO’s synopsis has Agnes seizing an opportunity to regain her position, while the trailer puts a dinner for President Grover Cleveland, played by Jim Gaffigan, at the centre of it. The trailer also gave her the season’s first line worth quoting: told to leave vengeance to the Lord, Agnes answers that she often finds the Lord “too lenient”. Earlier this year she also turned up in an episode of Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, HBO Max’s spin-off of The Big Bang Theory.

A first West End role at seventy-four

Then came London. Emily Burns’ revival of Hay Fever began performances at Wyndham’s Theatre in September 2026, with Baranski as Judith Bliss opposite Richard E. Grant as her novelist husband, David, and a press night on October 1. On the Table Manners podcast she said she wanted to raise her game as an American doing Coward alongside English actors, and admitted the role suited her stage of life: Judith thinks she is getting old but is not ready to retire. “If this is my last play,” she said, “it’s the perfect play to say OK, bye.” The reviews were good rather than unanimous. WhatsOnStage gave the production four stars and called it “a well-oiled clock”, while the Guardian’s review singled out Ophelia Lovibond’s Sorel.

Offstage she has kept a quieter life than her characters. She was married to the actor Matthew Cowles from 1983 until his death in May 2014, and they had two daughters, Isabel and Lily, the younger an actress. She lives in Bethlehem, Connecticut. In 2018 she was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

Hay Fever plays at Wyndham’s until December 12, 2026, and National Theatre Live will put the filmed production in cinemas on January 14, 2027, while Agnes van Rhijn’s campaign plays out week by week on HBO. As for a third Mamma Mia!, Baranski confirms only that producer Judy Craymer is working on it. “I don’t know if it’s happening,” she said in October. Whether Judith Bliss really is her farewell to the stage, she has left as open as Coward leaves the Blisses’ weekend.