Mary-Louise Parker

The one major acting award this wide-eyed brunette hasn't won is the Oscar. Adept at playing quirky, smart but usually fragile characters, Parker made her Broadway debut in 1990 as a fearful newlywed who unwittingly switches souls with an old man in Craig Lucas' Prelude to a Kiss. The next year she won raves as an abused wife in the Southern-flavored big-screen dramedy Fried Green Tomatoes. From then on, it was all about her TV and stage work, particularly Proof, as a mentally unstable math genius for which she won the 2001 Tony. Unfortunately, although she did appear in a number of films, she wasn't considered a leading actress. So when Hollywood decided to turn her two signature stage projects into movies, she wasn't invited to the party. (Meg Ryan and Gwyneth Paltrow landed the leads in Prelude to a Kiss and Proof, respectively.) Parker wisely ventured into series television in 2002 with a recurring role on The West Wing and won an Emmy and a Golden Globe as a Mormon wife in the lauded 2003 miniseries Angels in America. Unfortunately, that same year she went through a lot of off-screen drama, too, when her long-tome boyfriend Billy Crudup left her while she was pregnant with their son. She bounced back in 2005 with a lead role on the series Weeds, which landed her a 2006 Golden Globe and a boyfriend, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who played her deceased husband in a handful of episodes.