Jayne Houdyshell

Jayne Houdyshell
Jayne Houdyshell at Transport Group Gala 2013
Born	(1953-09-25) September 25, 1953 (age 63) Topeka, Kansas, U.S.

Jayne Houdyshell (born September 25, 1953) is an American theater actress.

Raised in Topeka, Kansas, she is the youngest of four daughters born to Galen "Buzz" Houdyshell and Louella Taylor. She graduated from Topeka High School in 1971, and she went on to graduate with honors from the Academy of Dramatic Art at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan in 1974.

Since the mid-1970s, she has appeared in more than 200 plays at regional theaters throughout the United States, including the Meadow Brook Theater, Attic Theater, Missouri Repertory Theater, Asolo Repertory Theatre, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Yale Repertory Theater, McCarter Theater, Delaware Theater Company, Wilma Theater, Syracuse Stage, Studio Arena, GeVa Theater, Actors Theater of Louisville, Steppenwolf Theater, American Conservatory Theater, Totem Pole Playhouse, Peterborough Players, and others.

Houdyshell reminisces that, after moving to Manhattan in 1980, “I was traveling all that 20 years...There was a community of actors who did that. We were itinerant actors who just continually moved around the country from theater to theater and job to job...Detroit. Kansas City. Sarasota. Louisville. Buffalo. Syracuse. She did Shirley Valentine five different times. She did four Broadway Bound 's and three Importance of Being Earnest 's, not including the one she later stepped into on Broadway. She did the warhorses by Coward, Inge, Williams, Miller, Shaw."

In New York, she may be best known for her role as "Ann Kron" in the Broadway production of Well by Lisa Kron. It was a role that garnered her a Tony Award nomination in 2006. She won a Theater World Award and an Obie Award, Outstanding Performance, for the Off-Broadway production of Well, which ran in 2004 at the Public Theater.