With a career spanning more than forty years in television, film, and on stage, Stockard Channing is a household name. Her breakout role was as the arch bad girl Betty Rizzo, leader of the Pink Ladies, in the 1978 smash hit “Grease.” Her work has ushered in numerous award-winning performances both on stage and on screen.
Born Susan Williams Antonia Stockard, Channing is the daughter of a wealthy shipping executive and a Brooklyn-based Irish Catholic mother. She studied history and literature at Radcliffe College of Harvard University in Massachusetts and graduated summa cum laude in 1965. While there, she became interested in the dramatic arts, and after graduating joined the experimental Boston Theater Company. She also trained at HB Studio in New York City.
In 1971, she made her Broadway debut in “Two Gentlemen of Verona: The Musical.” Two years later, she landed her first leading role in the television movie “The Girl Most Likely To...,” a black comedy written by Joan Rivers. Throughout the latter half of the 1970s, she appeared in “The Fortune,” “Sweet Revenge,” “The Big Bus,” and “The Cheap Detective.”
After two short-lived sitcoms, “Stockard Channing in Just Friends” and “The Stockard Channing Show,” the 1980s provided mostly supporting actress roles in film. She returned to the Broadway stage in the lead for “They're Playing Our Song,” followed by “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg,” which garnered her the 1985 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.
Channing’s successful stage career continued with Tony Award nominations for her performances in “The House of Blue Leaves” and “Six Degrees of Separation,” for which she also won an Obie Award and the Drama League Distinguished Performance Award. In 1993, she reprised her role as the Upper East Side mother Ouisa Kittredge in the film adaptation of “Six Degrees of Separation,” earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.
Channing then went on to star as First Lady Abbey Bartlet in the NBC television series “The West Wing” and appeared in “The Matthew Shepard Story,” winning Emmy Awards for both. She won a Daytime Emmy Award in 2004 for her role in “Jack” and also played the recurring role of Veronica Loy on the CBS drama “The Good Wife.” Other recognizable hits include “Anywhere But Here,” “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar”, “Up Close & Personal”, and “Practical Magic.”