Laura Leggett Linney (born February 5, 1964) is an American actress of film, television, and theatre. Linney has won three Emmy Awards, two Golden Globes, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. She has been nominated for the Academy Award three times and once for the BAFTA Award. She has also been nominated three times for a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play.

She received a Golden Globe award for her role in The Big C.

Linney was born in Manhattan. Her mother, Miriam Anderson "Ann" Perse (née Leggett), is a nurse who worked at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, and her father, Romulus Linney, was a well-known playwright and professor. He died on January 15, 2011. Linney's paternal great-great-grandfather was Republican U.S. Congressman Romulus Zachariah Linney. Despite her pedigree, Linney grew up living with her mother in a small one-bedroom apartment in modest circumstances, after her parents' divorce. She has a half-sister, Susan, from her father's second marriage. Linney graduated from the Northfield Mount Hermon School in 1982. She then attended Northwestern University before transferring to Brown University, where she studied acting with Jim Barnhill and John Emigh and served on the board of Production Workshop, the university's student theatre group. Linney graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1986 and then went on to study acting at the Juilliard School.