Cynthia Ellen Nixon is an American actor and activist. For her portrayal of Miranda Hobbes in the HBO series Sex and the City, Nixon won the 2004 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. She reprised the role in the films Sex and the City and Sex and the City 2. Take a look below for 30 more fun and fascinating facts about Cynthia Nixon.

1. Nixon was born in Manhattan, the only child of Walter Elmer Nixon Jr., a radio journalist from Texas,and Anne Elizabeth, an actress originally from Chicago.

2. She is of English and German descent.

3. Her grandparents were Adolph Knoll, Etta Elizabeth Williams, Walter E. Nixon, Sr., and Grace Truman McCormack.

4. Nixon’s parents divorced when she was six years old.

5. According to Nixon, her father was often unemployed and her mother was the household’s main breadwinner.

6. Nixon’s mother worked on the game show To Tell the Truth, coaching the “impostors” who claimed to be the person described by the host.

7. Nixon made her first television appearance on the show at 9 as one of the “impostors”, pretending to be a junior horse riding champion.

8. Nixon was an actress all through her years at Hunter College Elementary School and Hunter College High School (class of 1984), often taking time away from school to perform in film and on stage.

9. Nixon also acted in order to pay her way through Barnard College, where she received a B.A. in English Literature.

10. In the spring of 1986, she studied abroad with Semester at Sea.

11. Nixon’s first onscreen appearance was as an impostor on To Tell the Truth, where her mother worked.

12. he began acting at 12 as the object of a wealthy schoolmate’s crush in The Seven Wishes of a Rich Kid, a 1979 ABC Afterschool Special.

13. She made her feature debut co-starring with Kristy McNichol and Tatum O’Neal in Little Darlings (1980).

14. She made her Broadway debut as Dinah Lord in a 1980 revival of The Philadelphia Story.

15. Alternating between film, TV, and stage, she did projects like the 1982 ABC movie My Body, My Child, the features Prince of the City (1981) and I Am the Cheese (1983), and the 1982 Off-Broadway productions of John Guare’s Lydie Breeze.

16. She raised her profile significantly as one of the four regulars on HBO’s successful comedy Sex and the City (1998–2004), as the lawyer Miranda Hobbes.

17. Nixon received three Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series (2002, 2003, 2004), winning the award in 2004, for the show’s final season.

18. In March 2010, Nixon received the Vito Russo Award at the GLAAD Media Awards. The award is presented to an openly LGBT media professional “who has made a significant difference in promoting equality for the LGBT community”.

19. In 2012, Nixon starred as Professor Vivian Bearing in the Broadway debut of Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play Wit.

20. Nixon played the leading role of reclusive American poet Emily Dickinson in the biographical film A Quiet Passion directed and written by Terence Davies.

21. Nixon appeared on Broadway in the revival of The Little Foxes, officially opening on April 19, 2017 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. She alternated the roles of Regina and Birdie with Laura Linney, winning her second Tony Award for her performance as Birdie.

22. In January 2019, it was announced that Nixon will star in the upcoming Netflix drama series Ratched.

23. Nixon is a long-time advocate for public education. She is a spokesperson for New York’s Alliance for Quality Education, a public education fairness advocacy organization.

24. Nixon also has a history of advocacy in support of women’s health.

25. She endorsed Bill de Blasio in the 2013 New York City mayoral election, who went on to win the Democratic nomination and the general election. Nixon campaigned actively for de Blasio, whom she had worked with since the early 2000s when campaigning against Michael Bloomberg’s education policies.

26. From 1988 to 2003, Nixon was in a relationship with schoolteacher Danny Mozes. They have two children together. In June 2018, Nixon revealed that her oldest child is transgender.

27. In 2004, Nixon began dating education activist Christine Marinoni.

28. Nixon and Marinoni became engaged in April 2009, and married in New York City on May 27, 2012, with Nixon wearing a custom-made, pale green dress by Carolina Herrera. Marinoni gave birth to a son, Max Ellington, in 2011.

29. Regarding her sexual orientation, Nixon remarked in 2007: “I don’t really feel I’ve changed. I’d been with men all my life, and I’d never fallen in love with a woman. But when I did, it didn’t seem so strange. I’m just a woman in love with another woman.” She identified herself as bisexual in 2012.

30. Nixon and her family attend Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, an LGBT synagogue.