Learning from Linney
After laboring to draw her father’s attention away from the ballgame on TV, Cathy Jamison stands in front of the set and confronts him. She tells him she loves him. She tells him that he’s a jerk. She just doesn’t tell him that she has cancer. The crowd at the New College Theatre applauded as they watched this scene from the Showtime series “The Big C.” The actress who delivered the lines, Laura Linney, sat at the front of the room and looked on in distress. “I try to tell a story as honestly as I can,” she said after the clip had finished playing. “Sometimes I succeed. Sometimes I don’t. It’s agony for me to watch myself do anything.” “What I love about the theater is that you’re constantly a student for the rest of your life,” Laura Linney told 100 members of the Harvard community as part of the Office for...