Elizabeth Perkins

Elizabeth Ann Perkins (born November 18, 1960) is an American actress. Her film roles have included Big, The Flintstones, Miracle on 34th Street, About Last Night..., and Avalon. She is perhaps best known for her role as Celia Hodes in the Showtime series Weeds. --- Perkins was born in Queens, New York City, the daughter of Jo Williams, a drug treatment counselor and concert pianist, and James Perkins, a farmer, writer, and businessman. Her paternal grandparents were Greek immigrants from Salonika who anglicized their surname from "Pisperikos" to "Perkins" when they emigrated to the United States. Perkins was raised in Colrain, Massachusetts; her parents divorced in 1963. She began working in theatre with Arena Civic Theatre, a non-profit community theatre group based out of Greenfield, Massachusetts. Perkins attended Northfield Mount Hermon School, an elite preparatory school, and then spent three years in Chicago studying acting at the Goodman School of Drama. In 1984, she made her theatrical debut on Broadway in Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs and afterward, worked in a number of ensemble companies, including The New York Shakespeare Festival and the Steppenwolf Theater. She was listed as one of the 12 "Promising New Actors of 1986" in John Willis' Screen World, and has since landed numerous film roles. Perkins made her film debut in 1986 in Edward Zwick's About Last Night... and had a career breakthrough co-starring with Tom Hanks in Big. She received critical acclaim for her performance in Barry Levinson's Avalon, and was a standout opposite William Hurt in The Doctor (1991), receiving critical acclaim for her performance as a terminal cancer patient. --- Perkins' first husband was Chicago actor and director Terry Kinney; the couple divorced. She has one daughter, Hannah Phillips, born in 1991. In 2000, she married her present husband, Argentinian-born cinematographer Julio Macat, gaining three stepsons: Maximillian, Alexander, and Andreas. In 2005, at the age of 44, she learned that she had latent autoimmune diabetes, a form of Juvenile diabetes that is most often diagnosed in middle age.