Cynthia Nixon

Nixon was in a relationship with educator Danny Mozes from 1988 to 2003, and they have two children. She married education activist Christine Marinoni in New York City on May 27, 2012, after becoming engaged in 2009. Marinoni gave birth to their son in 2011, giving Nixon three children in total.

Nixon has described herself as bisexual and later as queer. She became an advocate for breast cancer awareness after being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006 and publicly discussing her treatment in 2008. She later served as an ambassador for Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

Nixon began performing as a child and appeared as an imposter on To Tell the Truth when she was eight. She made her feature-film debut in Little Darlings in 1980 and made her Broadway debut that year as Dinah Lord in a revival of The Philadelphia Story. She studied at Barnard College and continued working in film, television, and theater while completing her education.

In 1984, while a freshman at Barnard, Nixon appeared simultaneously in Mike Nichols's Broadway productions of The Real Thing and Hurlyburly. Her other stage credits included The Heidi Chronicles, Angels in America, Indiscretions, The Women, and The Last Night of Ballyhoo. She won her first Tony Award for playing Becca in Rabbit Hole in 2006 and her second for playing Birdie Hubbard in The Little Foxes in 2017. Nixon was also a founding member of the New York theater company Drama Dept.

Nixon's breakthrough came with Sex and the City, in which she played Miranda Hobbes from 1998 to 2004. Miranda was a sharp, successful New York lawyer whose experiences with motherhood and marriage changed her outlook. Nixon won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for the role in 2004.

She reprised Miranda in Sex and the City: The Movie, Sex and the City 2, and the revival series And Just Like That..., on which she also served as an executive producer and director. Her other notable screen performances include Eleanor Roosevelt in Warm Springs, Emily Dickinson in A Quiet Passion, Nancy Reagan in Killing Reagan, Gwendolyn Briggs in Ratched, and Ada Brook in The Gilded Age. She won a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album in 2009 for An Inconvenient Truth, sharing the award with Beau Bridges and Blair Underwood.

Although Miranda Hobbes was known for red hair, Nixon is naturally blonde and dyed her hair for Sex and the City.

Nixon has advocated for LGBT rights, including same-sex marriage, and has worked on public education and women's health issues. She has been a spokesperson for New York's Alliance for Quality Education and endorsed Bill de Blasio in his 2013 campaign for New York City mayor. She later endorsed Bernie Sanders during the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.

On March 19, 2018, Nixon announced her campaign for governor of New York, challenging Democratic incumbent Andrew Cuomo. Her platform emphasized income inequality, renewable energy, universal health care, public education, mass incarceration, and protections for undocumented children. She also made marijuana legalization a central campaign issue, framing it as a matter of racial justice, and called for the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Cuomo defeated Nixon in the Democratic primary, receiving 66 percent of the vote to her 34 percent.