Felicity Huffman plays clever, overworked women who are good at their jobs and bad at being thanked for it, and she makes competence funny, which is harder than making it admirable. She is best in a fast ensemble, headset on, clock running.
Fi1m perspective
Felicity Huffman spends most of Sports Night (1998) in a headset with one hand in the air, counting a live programme down to the second while two presenters bicker in front of her. She is not the funniest person in the control room and she is not trying to be. What she does is make Dana Whitaker's competence funny, which is a good deal harder than making it admirable, and it is the thing she has done best ever since.
The career, as a viewer sees it, comes in three parts. First there was theatre and a long run of small film and television parts through the 1980s and 1990s, out of the Atlantic Theater Company she helped found and the David Mamet school of fast, hard talk, which is where the timing comes from. Sports Night (1998-2000) was her first regular series role and Magnolia (1999) a supporting part in a crowded film. Then came Desperate Housewives (2004-2012), eight seasons as Lynette Scavo, the harried mother, and the part most people still see when they see her. In between she took the lead in Transamerica (2005) as Bree Osbourne, a role built on changing her voice and the way she carried herself, and later did two anthology seasons of John Ridley's American Crime (2015) as Barb Hanlon and then Leslie Graham.
Her strength is a particular kind of woman: clever, quick, resilient, up to her neck in work or children or both, and unwilling to be pitied for it. She is at her best in an ensemble that talks fast, where she can hold a line under three other people and still land the joke. In Sports Night, after a bad night, Isaac tells Dana she made the right call, barely above a murmur, and the camera stays on Huffman while she takes it in. We put the cup down. She says nothing, and it is the moment we remember from the whole series.
The trouble came after Lynette. Eight years as one woman is a long time, and audiences found it hard to accept her as anyone else; American Crime, which asked her to play two women a long way from Wisteria Lane, met that resistance. She has said herself: "I never got offered the ingenue roles. I think I wasn't pretty enough and I wasn't thin enough, so I was offered the character roles. And I've loved playing strong, complicated women." That is an honest account of the career and a fair warning about its limits.
Start with Sports Night, where she is surrounded by people who talk as fast as she does. The later work is larger and slower, and she is never quite so good sitting down.
Biography
Felicity Huffman is an American actress. Born on 9 December 1962 in Bedford, New York, she trained at the Interlochen Arts Academy and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, as well as the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
She began her career in theatre and made her film debut in Things Change (1988). Early screen roles include Minnie in Reversal of Fortune (1990), an attorney in Hackers (1995) and Cynthia in Magnolia (1999). She is known for playing Lynette Scavo in the series Desperate Housewives (2004–2012) and Sabrina “Bree” Osbourne in Transamerica (2005).
Huffman has been married to actor William H. Macy since 1997.
