Who Is Julianna Margulies? The Actress Behind ER and The Good Wife
Julianna Margulies is an American actress best known for two roles: nurse Carol Hathaway on the NBC medical drama ER and lawyer Alicia Florrick on the CBS legal drama The Good Wife. She has won three Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe, and eight Screen Actors Guild Awards, which makes her the second most awarded woman in the history of the SAG Awards. Now in her late 50s, she keeps working across television, film, and the Broadway stage.
If you know her face but not her name, or you know one role and not the rest, here is the full picture: where she came from, how she broke through, the parts that made her famous, and what she is up to today.
Who is Julianna Margulies?
Julianna Margulies is a New York actress with a career built mostly on television, where she has played two of the most memorable women in the medium. She was born on June 8, 1966, in Spring Valley, New York, the youngest of three daughters. Her father, Paul Margulies, was a Madison Avenue advertising writer, and her mother, Francesca, was a ballet dancer and teacher.
Her childhood was anything but settled. She moved often as a girl, living in England and Paris as well as in the United States, which meant French was actually her first language, though she has since lost the fluency. She wrote about this restless upbringing in her 2021 memoir, Sunshine Girl: An Unexpected Life, describing it as loving but unstable.
She went to Sarah Lawrence College, where she focused on art history, English, and theatre. She enrolled thinking she might become a lawyer, like her grandmother, or a psychologist. Acting won her over instead, and she graduated in 1989 with her mind set on it.
How did she get her start?
Margulies got her first screen role in 1991, playing a prostitute in the Steven Seagal action film Out for Justice. It was a small part, and steady work did not follow right away. She waited more than a year for her next role and kept herself afloat with regional theatre and national TV commercials. She had waited tables to pay rent before that first job, and the lean stretch after it tested whether she really wanted this life. She kept at it, taking guest spots on series like Law & Order while she built toward something bigger.
The turning point came in 1994, and it almost did not happen the way it did. She was cast in the pilot of ER as Carol Hathaway, an emergency room nurse whose character was written to attempt suicide and die. Test audiences loved her so much that producers reversed the plan and kept the character alive.
There was a second lucky break tangled up in the first. At the same time, NBC had offered her an extended role on Homicide: Life on the Street. Her ER co-star George Clooney, who had shot the pilot with her, called to tell her he had overheard producers talking about making her a series regular. He urged her to wait for ER to call. She did, the call came, and she took it.
What made her a star on ER?
ER turned Margulies into a household name almost overnight, and Carol Hathaway became one of the show’s anchor characters. The medical drama was a ratings giant through the 1990s, and Carol, the steady, warm-hearted nurse manager, was central to it. Margulies played her as a series regular from 1994 to 2000.
She won a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series in 1995 for the role, and she was the only regular cast member of ER ever to win an acting Emmy. She was nominated every single year she was on the show, plus four times for a Golden Globe.
Then she walked away, and the decision drew real backlash. NBC reportedly offered her 27 million dollars to stay for two more seasons. Turning that down would have cost her a spot among the highest-paid women on television. She said no anyway. She was homesick for New York, tired of the character’s direction, and wanted to return to theatre, even at a fraction of the money.
“I had a year’s worth of work waiting and a mortgage completely paid at age 32,” she recalled of the choice. She wanted to do theatre and travel, not wait around to get rich.
Her reasons were personal as much as professional. She had spent six years filming in Los Angeles and missed New York badly. She also felt the writing was pulling Carol away from the character she had carefully built. In one interview she remembered a script line that gave Carol seven sisters, when she had spent six years playing her as an only child, and had even researched what that felt like. Watching that research get undone convinced her it was time to go.
She did return once more, for a single episode during ER’s final season in 2009, calling Clooney to say she would do it if he did. He agreed, and the two came back together for a full-circle sendoff. Even now, ER follows her everywhere. She has said that on a trip to Ireland, people in tiny villages recognized her from the show, because streaming keeps introducing it to new viewers decades after it first aired.
Why is The Good Wife such a big deal?
The Good Wife is the role that proved Margulies was not a one-hit lead, and for many fans it is her defining performance. The CBS drama premiered in 2009 and ran for seven seasons until 2016. She played Alicia Florrick, a lawyer who returns to work after her husband, a Chicago politician played by Chris Noth, is jailed in a sex and corruption scandal.
What made the show land was the arc. Alicia starts as a humiliated political wife standing silently beside her husband at a press conference, and over 156 episodes she grows into a sharp, ambitious, deeply complicated attorney with her own power and her own flaws. It was a rare part: a woman written with real depth, front and center, week after week.
For The Good Wife, Margulies won two more Emmy Awards, in 2011 and 2014, plus a Golden Globe and two more SAG Awards. Starting with the third season, she was also credited as a producer, giving her a hand in shaping the show she carried.
The Good Wife also arrived at the right cultural moment. It aired as viewers were rethinking the political-scandal playbook, and it let Alicia be angry, ambitious, and morally gray rather than a saintly victim. Critics praised it as one of the smartest network dramas of its era, and it kept a large audience across all seven seasons on traditional broadcast TV, at a time when prestige drama was drifting to cable and streaming.
Margulies did not reprise Alicia for the spin-off The Good Fight, and the reason says something about her. CBS wanted her back for three episodes but offered a guest-star rate. She refused on principle, pointing out that a male lead asked to appear on a spin-off of his own show would have been paid far more. She did not need the money; she needed the respect.
She has said the two roles are tied as her proudest work. In her words, she got to play two of the richest female characters on television, and she does not rank Carol above Alicia or the other way around.
What are her other well-known roles?
Beyond her two signature parts, Margulies has a long and varied résumé across TV and film. A few highlights stand out for anyone wanting to see more of her work:
- The Sopranos (2006 to 2007): a four-episode run as real estate agent Julianna Skiff on the HBO landmark.
- The Mists of Avalon (2001): she led the TNT fantasy miniseries as Morgaine, a role she had wanted since reading the novel as a child.
- The Hot Zone (2019): she starred as Dr. Nancy Jaax in the National Geographic thriller about an Ebola outbreak, which became the network’s highest-rated scripted series.
- The Morning Show (2021 to 2023): she joined the Apple TV+ hit as news anchor Laura Peterson, opposite Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon.
- Films: her movie credits include Ghost Ship, Snakes on a Plane, City Island, Stand Up Guys with Al Pacino, and The Upside.
She also took a rare Fox lead in the short-lived legal series Canterbury’s Law (2008) and appeared in AMC’s Dietland and Showtime’s Billions. Her range runs from prestige drama to popcorn horror, and she moves between them comfortably.
The stage runs underneath all of it. Between and around her television work she kept returning to theatre, appearing in New York productions at Lincoln Center and MCC Theater, whose board she now sits on. That grounding in live performance is part of why the Broadway lead she took in 2024 felt less like a detour and more like a homecoming.
How many awards has she won?
Margulies has one of the strongest awards records of any television actress working today. Her hardware includes one Golden Globe, three Primetime Emmys, and eight Screen Actors Guild Awards. That SAG total is the headline number: it makes her the second most awarded woman in the show’s history, behind only Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
| Award | Wins | Mainly for |
|---|---|---|
| Primetime Emmy | 3 | ER and The Good Wife |
| SAG Award | 8 | ER and The Good Wife |
| Golden Globe | 1 | The Good Wife |
The recognition goes past trophies. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in 2015 Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world, noting her work to help pass Erin’s Law, which addresses child sexual abuse, in states across the country.
What is she doing now?
Margulies is still very much a working actress, and lately she has leaned into the stage and independent film. In 2024 she returned to Broadway for the first time in nearly two decades, starring as writer Delia Ephron in Left on Tenth, a play based on Ephron’s memoir about losing her husband, finding love again in her 70s, and surviving leukemia. She played opposite Peter Gallagher, with Susan Stroman directing, at the James Earl Jones Theatre.
On screen, she appeared in the third season of The Morning Show and in the Ed Burns marital drama Millers in Marriage, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and reached audiences in 2025. She has also wrapped the independent film Penny, set in 1970s New York, and she is joining the cast of the Hulu series Paradise for its third season.
She has stepped behind the scenes too, executive producing Jack and Sam, an Oscar-qualified documentary short about two Holocaust survivors reunited after 80 years. Off camera, she founded a Holocaust education program at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, where she serves as a trustee. In short, she is busy, and she is choosing projects that matter to her rather than chasing the next big paycheck.
Her writing has become part of the story as well. She had planned to write a handbook about how actors should behave on set, but it turned into Sunshine Girl instead, a candid look at a chaotic childhood and the long road to a stable adult life. She recorded the audiobook herself. Taken together, her recent choices, a Broadway play about grief and second chances, indie films, a documentary, a memoir, sketch a performer more interested in meaning than in scale.
Personal life and family
Margulies has kept her home life steady and largely private, which is its own kind of Hollywood story. She married attorney Keith Lieberthal in 2007 in Lenox, Massachusetts. Their son, Kieran, was born in 2008. The family lives in Manhattan and keeps a country house upstate.
She often credits her husband and son as the calm center of her life, the reason she guards her weekends and turns down projects that would swallow her family time. Before Lieberthal, she was in a long relationship with actor Ron Eldard, whom she met in an acting class, from 1991 to 2003. She published her memoir in 2021 and, years earlier, a children’s picture book called Three Magic Balloons, based on a story her father wrote for her and her sisters.
To learn more about her stage and screen credits in full, the Television Academy’s official bio is a solid, authoritative starting point, and her BroadwayWorld profile tracks her theatre work.
Frequently asked questions
What is Julianna Margulies best known for?
She is best known for playing nurse Carol Hathaway on ER (1994 to 2000) and lawyer Alicia Florrick on The Good Wife (2009 to 2016). Both roles won her major awards and made her one of TV’s most recognized actresses.
How many Emmys has Julianna Margulies won?
She has won three Primetime Emmy Awards: one for ER in 1995 and two for The Good Wife, in 2011 and 2014. She has also won eight Screen Actors Guild Awards and one Golden Globe.
Why did Julianna Margulies leave ER?
She turned down a reported 27 million dollar offer to stay two more seasons. She was homesick for New York, wanted to return to theatre, and felt her character’s story had run its course. She came back for one episode in 2009.
Is Julianna Margulies married?
Yes. She married attorney Keith Lieberthal in 2007, and they have a son, Kieran, born in 2008. The family lives in Manhattan.
What is Julianna Margulies working on now?
She recently starred on Broadway in Left on Tenth, appeared in The Morning Show and the film Millers in Marriage, wrapped the indie film Penny, and joined the third season of the Hulu series Paradise.
Conclusion
Julianna Margulies is one of television’s most decorated actresses, defined by Carol Hathaway on ER and Alicia Florrick on The Good Wife and backed by three Emmys, a Golden Globe, and eight SAG Awards. She turned down big money to protect her craft, built a long career on her own terms, and keeps working across TV, film, and Broadway. To see her at her best, start with either signature role and follow her from there.
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