Margaret Colin is an American actress whose career spans more than four decades across daytime and primetime television, film, and Broadway. She was born in Brooklyn to a large Irish-Catholic family and raised on Long Island.
Colin attended Hofstra University and trained in drama at both the Stella Adler Conservatory and The Juilliard School. She got her start on the soaps The Edge of Night and As the World Turns, where she met her husband, actor Justin Deas. The two have been married since 1988 and are raising two sons together.
Colin transitioned into film in the mid-1980s, appearing as Molly Ringwald’s English teacher in John Hughes’s Pretty in Pink (1986), and going on to roles in Something Wild (1986), Like Father, Like Son (1987), and Three Men and a Baby (1987). She later starred opposite Harrison Ford as a married couple unwittingly harboring an Irish terrorist, played by Brad Pitt, in Alan J. Pakula’s The Devil’s Own, and appeared in the sci-fi blockbuster Independence Day (1996) as a presidential press secretary battling an alien invasion.
On television, Colin earned a Saturn Award for Best Genre TV Actress in 2000 for her role as Lisa Wiseman in the series Now and Again. She is also known for her recurring role as Eleanor Waldorf, mother of Blair Waldorf, across all six seasons of Gossip Girl (2007–2012). Other television credits include Chicago Hope, The Wright Verdicts, Elementary, The Good Wife, Blue Bloods, Nurse Jackie, Madam Secretary, and Veep, in which she reprised her role as McCabe in the show’s seventh-season premiere and again in the series finale in 2019.
A member of the Actors Studio, Colin has also built a substantial Broadway résumé. She received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her role in The Invention of Love, and an Outer Critics Circle Award nomination for her performance in Show Boat. Her Broadway credits also include Jackie: An American Life, for which she won a Theatre World Award, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, Old Acquaintance, Arcadia, The Columnist, and Carousel. She most recently starred on Broadway as Ruth Ackerman in David Lindsay-Abaire’s comedy The Balusters.
Margaret Colin is a member of the Board of Advisors, The Catholic Center at NYU.
