By Kathleen Archambeau

“I met this woman, I fell in love with her and I’m a public figure.”

Cynthia Nixon
Tony Award-Winning Actress

For 15 years, Cynthia Nixon looked like any other up-and-coming New York actress, taking on juicy heterosexual roles, raising her two children, Samantha and Charlie, with long-time English professor boyfriend, Danny Mozes, and garnering nearly every acting award, from Emmys to a Tony, from Screen Actors Guild Awards to a Grammy. That galaxy of awards puts her in the company of only 15 performers. If she wins an Oscar, she’ll do what only 8 others have done. So why did Sex and the City’s only supporting actress to win an Emmy Award shave her head this year?

For those who have followed Cynthia Nixon’s career as I have, beginning with the first play on Broadway I saw her in, Wendy Wasserstein’s Heidi’s Chronicles, Nixon is a consummate theater actor. To prepare for her 2012 role as a cancer-stricken professor in Wit, Nixon shaved her head bald. Not many beautiful 46-year-old women would walk around New York City bald, but Cynthia Nixon wanted to live the part. She should know. At age 40, Nixon was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a lumpectomy and radiation. She went public two years later, in 2008, on Good Morning America, and has since become a breast cancer advocate.

But how did she fall in love with a woman? Prior to her public education advocacy work where she met education activist, Christine Marinoni, Cynthia Nixon had only dated and been in long-term relationships with men. Sex and the City’s real-life friend, Kristin Davis, the Charlotte York character, finally noticed that her costar was spending more and more time with Marinoni. They met in 2003 advocating for better public schools and have been together ever since.

At a Rally for Equal Marriage in NYC in 2009, Nixon announced that she and Christine Marinoni were formally engaged, citing she had the ring to prove it. In 2011, Marinoni gave birth to their baby boy named Max Ellington Nixon Marinoni. Christine’s nickname is “Rojo Caliente.” As Nixon describes her lesbian partnership, “Maybe I’m just lucky, but I feel like Christine is so amazing with our kids…she makes our family so much better.” (U.S. Weekly)

Cynthia Nixon, best known to American television audiences for her role as Sex and the City’s Type A lawyer Miranda Hobbs will face stiff competition for the 2012 Tony Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play, competing with Stockard Channing in Other Desert Cities (set in Palm Springs), Nina Arianda in Venus in Fur, Tracie Bennett in End of the Rainbow, and Linda Lavin in The Lyons. For a performance that the New York Times called “illuminating…Ms. Nixon’s performance cut closer and closer to the bone” and the Hollywood Reporter says of Nixon that she “gave a shattering performance…mixed dry humor and wrenching pathos,” our own Cynthia Nixon may win yet another Tony Award on June 10th 2012 for her “uncommonly stirring piece of theater” in Broadway’s Wit.