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Mira Katherine Sorvino (born September 28, 1967) is an Academy Award- and Golden Globe Award-winning American actress. Despite her sex-symbol good looks, Mandarin-speaking Harvard graduate Mira Sorvino has demonstrated the unpretentious heart of a character actor inherited from her father Paul, whose resume includes critically-acclaimed turns in Martin Scorsese's "GoodFellas" (1990) and Oliver Stone's "Nixon" (1995, as Henry Kissinger) among his many roles. Adept at assuming accents, hair colors and varied ethnic identities, this bright, naturally brunette Italianate beauty received her first substantial exposure on film as an enigmatic, aristocratic Spanish translator in "Barcelona" (1994), Whit Stillman's thoughtfully comic talkfest. She entered the mainstream later that same year playing the Jewish intellectual wife of Rob Morrow in Robert Redford's "Quiz Show". Redford had first became aware of the young performer in Rob Weiss' "Amongst Friends" (1993), a highly regarded independent feature shown in competition at the Sundance Film Festival. Starting out as third assistant director on that project, she graduated to casting director and finally the lead femme role of the modest drama about well-to-do suburban Jews who fall into lives of crime, ultimately receiving credit as associate producer. Sorvino was born in Tenafly, New Jersey, the daughter of Lorraine Davis, a drama therapist for Alzheimer's patients and former actress, and Paul Sorvino, an Italian American character actor and director. She has two siblings, Michael, and Amanda, a playwright. Her father did not want his children to become actors; at a young age, however, Sorvino wrote and acted in backyard plays with her childhood friend Hope Davis, in theater productions at Dwight-Englewood High School and Harvard University, where she graduated magna cum laude in East Asian Studies. Her thesis was on anti-African sentiment in China. While at Harvard, she helped found the Harvard-Radcliffe Veritones, one of Harvard's premier co-ed a cappella groups. Her solo piece was Yaz's "Only You". Sorvino spent the next three years in New York City, trying to make a name for herself as an actress. When the 1993 film Amongst Friends entered pre-production, she was hired as third assistant director, then was promoted to casting director, then to assistant producer, and was finally offered a lead role. Positive reviews opened doors for her. After small but showy roles in Robert Redford's Quiz Show and Whit Stillman's Barcelona, her portrayal of a squeaky-voiced, foul-mouthed prostitute in Woody Allen's 1995 film Mighty Aphrodite won her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Other credits include Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (opposite Lisa Kudrow) and At First Sight with Val Kilmer. She portrayed Marilyn Monroe for the 1995 HBO film Norma Jean and Marilyn. Sorvino subsequently portrayed Matt Dillon's long-suffering bulimic girlfriend in Ted Demme's ensemble comedy "Beautiful Girls" (1996) and earned an Emmy nomination that year for her turn as Marilyn Monroe in the HBO biopic "Norma Jean and Marilyn" (Ashley Judd shared the title role essaying Norma Jean) before "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion" (1997) recalled her Oscar-winning part ("I'm not really a blonde bimbo, I just play one in the movies"). Sorvino next turned her attention to genre fare, first starring as the brilliant entomologist whose mutant creations threaten NYC in Guillermo Del Toro's sci-fi horror thriller "Mimic" (1997), then teaming with Hong Kong action icon Chow Yun-Fat for some kung fu fighting in "The Replacement Killers" (1998), a disappointing Westernization of Chow's Hong Kong oeuvre. She found time to give a strong performance opposite Harvey Keitel in the meandering art film "Lulu on the Bridge", Auster's solo directing debut, and to play Death alluringly for Korean director Wonsuk Chin's quirky, cross-cultural "Too Tired to Die" (both 1998). Mainstream audiences got to see her as Val Kilmer's love interest in Irwin Winkler's schmaltzy "At First Sight" (1999), another movie based on the writings of Dr. Oliver Sachs. She also acted in that year's "Summer of Sam", Spike Lee's disco-era drama about a punk rocker nearly murdered by friends who suspect him of being the serial killer Son of Sam. In recent years, Sorvino has starred in lower budget and independent films. In 2005, she received a Golden Globe nomination for her role as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in the Lifetime film Human Trafficking. Sorvio next starred in the Lifetime miniseries, “Human Trafficking” (2005), a sobering look at the international sex-trade and its impact on the United States. She played a rookie vice squad detective who joins U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to go undercover as a Russian mail-order bride in order to snare a deadly New York crime lord (Robert Carlyle). Sorvino earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Miniseries or a Motion Picture Made for Television. She wrapped out 2005 filming “Robert Ludlum’s Covert One: The Hades Factor” (CBS, 2006), a made-for-TV spy thriller about an elite operative unit sent to investigate the source of a deadly virus threatening to kill millions. In February 2008 she guest starred in an episode of the medical television drama House. There was talk of making her character, psychiatrist Cate Milton, a recurring character; however, the writers strike put a temporary freeze on such discussions. Sorvino is 5'10" tall. She met actor Christopher Backus fourteen years her junior at a friend's charades party in August 2003: "He walked into the kitchen looking for silverware. We saw each other and something made us want to talk to each other more," she told People. They were engaged within a month. On June 11, 2004, they married in a private civil ceremony at a Santa Barbara, California courthouse, then later had a hilltop ceremony in Capri, Italy. Their daughter, Mattea Angel, was born on November 3, 2004 and their son, Johnny Christopher King, was born on May 29, 2006. She is affiliated with Amnesty International, and has been among the many Hollywood celebrities calling for United Nations action in Darfur. She spent a year of study in Beijing while attending Harvard. She is fluent in Mandarin Chinese, and also speaks French. In October of 2006, she was successfully evicted from her rent-stabilized one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan near Central Park when her landlord claimed that it was not her primary residence. She told New York magazine, “My landlords are selling the building, and they want the units cleared so they can turn it into a luxury rental, even though it’s a one-bedroom. I mean, it’s 600 square feet! No great digs, but I loved it and now it’s probably going to go for $4,000 a month ... I’m a little bitter! Can you tell?” In honor of Sorvino's role as Dr. Susan Tyler, an entomologist who was investigating deadly insect mutations in the feature film, Mimic, mirasorvone was the name given to a compound excreted by the sunburst diving beetle as a defensive mechanism. |
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