Who Is Jessica Lange?

Initially working as a model, Jessica Lange began her prolific acting career when she was chosen to star in the mega hit film King Kong (1976). In 1982, Lange received a best actress Academy Award nomination for the film Frances and won a best supporting actress Oscar for Tootsie. She later won another Oscar, this time in the best actress category, for her performance in 1994’s Blue Sky. Lange has received an array of accolades for additional projects like A Streetcar Named Desire (1995), A Thousand Acres (1997), Normal (2003), Grey Gardens (2009) and American Horror Story (2012), and received the first Tony of her career in 2016 for the Broadway revival of Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

FULL NAME: Jessica Phyllis Lange
BORN: April 20, 1949
BIRTHPLACE: Cloquet, Minnesota
SPOUSE: Paco Grande (m. 1970-1982)
CHILDREN: Shura Baryshnikov, Hannah Jane Shepard, Samuel Walker Shepard
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Taurus

Jessica Phyllis Lange was born on April 20, 1949, in Cloquet, Minnesota. The third of four children, Lange was the daughter of Dorothy Florence and Albert John Lange, who was an educator and salesman. As a child, Lange’s family moved constantly due to her father’s frequently changing jobs. Lange later noted that her family “lived like gypsies.” But instead of rebelling against this transient lifestyle, Lange inherited the travel bug. By the time she enrolled as an art student at the University of Minnesota in 1967, she had big dreams of seeing the world.

In the spring of 1968, before she had finished her freshman year, Lange met and fell in love with 24-year-old photography professor Paco Grande. Lange and Grande left school and traveled throughout the United States and Europe. They lived mostly out of Grande’s van, and Lange met many of Grande’s friends within the film community. They returned to Minnesota briefly in July 1970, where they were married.

The newlyweds moved to New York, eventually settling into the SoHo art community. Grande continued to work on film projects and Lange, inspired by French cinema, made the decision to study mime. In 1971, Lange moved to Paris to study mime with teacher Etienne Decroux. Her two years of education with Decroux sparked an interest in acting, and she returned to New York in 1973 to pursue a film career.

During her time abroad, Lange’s marriage to Paco Grande had deteriorated. Grande left Lange in New York, where she started working as a waitress and model with the Wilhelmina Agency in order to make ends meet. In the fall of 1975, film producer Dino De Laurentiis contacted Lange’s modeling agency looking for an actress to star in his new King Kong movie. An agent at Wilhelmina recommended Lange for the part. After a Hollywood screen test, she landed the role.

King Kong hit theaters in 1976, and was a box-office hit. Reviews for Lange, however, were largely negative, and focused on the fact that Lange was a former model. Although she had signed a seven-year acting contract with De Laurentiis, Lange did not work for three years following King Kong‘s release. During this time, Lange met Russian dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, and the two began dating.