Laura Benanti

Laura Ilene Benanti (née Vidnovic; born July 13, 1979) is an American actress and singer.

Over the course of her Broadway career, she has received five Tony Award nominations.

She graduated from Kinnelon High School in 1997.

In 1998, Paper Mill's then-artistic director Robert Johanson recommended Benanti for the role of Liesl in a Broadway revival of The Sound of Music.

She auditioned for the show's producers and was considered too mature-looking to play Liesl, but, after several call-backs, was signed at the age of 18 to play one of the nuns and to understudy Rebecca Luker as Maria.

Benanti played the role for two weeks while Luker was on vacation, and, at 19, took over the role when Luker left the production.

Michael Buckley of Playbill later wrote that Benanti "was an absolutely wonderful Maria ... As do others, I believe that had she opened in the show, Benanti would have been an overnight sensation."

When she was cast in The Sound of Music, Benanti had attended New York University for two weeks; the dean recommended she go on leave to take the job.

In 1999, Benanti appeared in the Broadway revue Swing!, for which she received a Tony nomination for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical.

In 2000, she co-starred with Donna Murphy in the critically acclaimed New York City Center Encores! concert production of the Leonard Bernstein-Betty Comden-Adolph Green musical Wonderful Town.

In 2002, Benanti played Cinderella (a role she had played as a teenager) in the Broadway revival of Into the Woods and received both a Tony nomination for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical and a Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical.

During a mid-performance pratfall in Into the Woods, Benanti fractured her neck, herniating two discs directly onto her spinal cord and cutting off spinal fluid, a condition that sometimes leads to paralysis.

The injury was misdiagnosed, and Into the Woods producers asked Benanti not to mention her injury; when she began missing performances due to neck problems, rumors spread that Benanti was behaving unprofessionally, something that she called "really hurtful".

She said, "I had a serious injury and there was absolutely no way I could have done the show. I tried to. I tried to go back and do it but I physically couldn't."

Benanti was eventually replaced in the show by Erin Dilly.

Three weeks after undergoing spinal surgery, Benanti started previews in March 2003 for the Broadway revival of Nine, in which she played Claudia, a movie star who inspires Guido, a director played by Antonio Banderas.

She left the show in September 2003.

Benanti appeared in the World AIDS Day concerts of Pippin, Children of Eden, and The Secret Garden.

Eight months after her initial injury, Benanti was rediagnosed and received surgery that could have damaged her voice but was successful, though as of 2005 she still experienced neck pain and myelopathy.

From April to December 2006, she played Julia Sullivan in the Broadway musical The Wedding Singer.

In July 2007, Benanti played in a three-week limited run of the musical Gypsy in the Encores!

staged concert production at the New York City Center as Louise, alongside Patti LuPone as Rose and Boyd Gaines as Herbie.

She played Louise in the 2008 Broadway revival of Gypsy, winning the 2008 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical.

In 2008, Benanti told The New York Times that she drew on this loneliness in her portrayal of the neglected Louise in Gypsy.

Though her parents refused to let Laura audition for professional theatre, Laura appeared in several high school and community productions, including Evita (as Perón's mistress), Follies (as Young Heidi), and Into the Woods (as Cinderella).

At 16, Benanti played the title role in her high school production of Hello, Dolly! and won a Paper Mill Playhouse Rising Star Award for Outstanding Actress in a high school production.

In March 2008, the production transferred to Broadway, where it ran until January 2009 and received widespread critical acclaim.

Benanti's performance as Louise was praised, with The New York Times's Ben Brantley declaring it "the performance of her career".

She won several awards, including a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical, and an Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical.

Benanti appeared in The Public Theater's world-premiere production of Christopher Durang's play Why Torture Is Wrong, And the People Who Love Them from April 6 to 26, 2009.

Benanti then appeared in the Broadway musical Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in 2010, winning the Drama Desk Award and Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical.

She played Elsa Schräder in the 2013 NBC television production of The Sound of Music Live! and, in 2015, began playing Supergirl's twin mother and aunt Alura and Astra in the TV series Supergirl.

Since 2016, she has had a recurring role as First Lady Melania Trump on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Benanti was born in New York City to Linda Wonneberger, a vocal coach and former actress, and Martin Vidnovic, a Broadway actor and singer.

She is of Serbian, German, and Irish heritage.

Her parents divorced when she was young.

She soon moved to Kinnelon, New Jersey, with her mother and stepfather Salvatore Benanti, a psychotherapist, whose name she took and whom she refers to as her father.

Benanti remembers being "very serious" and "a bit of an ugly duckling" as a child; she was intensely interested in musical theatre, saying she "came out of the womb as a 40-year-old".

She was particularly interested in the music of Stephen Sondheim at an early age and distanced herself from other children.

Benanti appeared as Edie Randall in the TBS comedy The Detour from 2017 until the show's cancellation in 2019.