Sharon Lawrence

The District Attorney's Office of Costas

Sharon Lawrence landed on the set of NYPD Blue in 1993 with a mission that seemed small. Her character (District Attorney Sylvia Costas) was meant to be a cold counterpoint to Andy Sipowicz's emotional volcano. But the chemistry between the two actors led the writers to rewrite the show's destiny.

She earned three consecutive Emmy nominations before the twentieth century ended. At the time, television was still divided into rigid blocks, and she broke the barrier between the character actress and the supporting star.

Theater was her first skin.

Before moving to Los Angeles, she spent years on Broadway in revivals of Cabaret or Fiddler on the Roof. That technical training helped her survive the frantic pace of weekly series without losing her composure. Lawrence is, above all, an actress of the text who prefers careful analysis to unnecessary showmanship.

In 1999, she decided her time as Sylvia Costas was over and sought refuge in projects that would let her step away from fictional courtrooms.

The Constant Change in Cable

The industry tends to punish actresses who pass forty (a trend she sidestepped with intelligence). Instead of fighting for mediocre leading roles, she accepted supporting parts in high-impact productions. That is how she ended up playing Maisie Gibbons on Desperate Housewives for 2004.

And the gamble paid off.

Her appearance on Grey’s Anatomy in 2009 earned her another Emmy nomination as a guest actress. She played Izzie Stevens's mother and showed she could carry a medical drama with just a couple of powerful scenes. By then, Spanish audiences already recognized her as a familiar face who guaranteed quality in any production on ABC.

But cable television offered her darker challenges. In 2016, she joined the cast of Shameless to play Margo, a property owner who would not take no for an answer. It was a necessary change of pace that helped her move away from the polished image she had carried since the nineties.

In 2019, she appeared in On Becoming a God in Central Florida, sharing the screen with Kirsten Dunst in a satire about pyramid schemes.

The Weight of Experience

Lawrence has worked every single year since her professional debut. In 2021, she joined the series Joe Pickett to play Missy Vane (a role she kept for 20 episodes until 2023). Critics praised her ability to embody the decadent elegance of a character who refuses to age in the rural setting of Wyoming.

But television pays the bills better.

Despite her success on television, she never gave up the stage. During 2022, she starred in the play The West End at the Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles. There she reconnected with the live audiences she had missed so much during the lockdown months of the health crisis.

In 2024, she joined the cast of the film The Lost Boys, playing Lucy. The production had a budget of $15 million and was shot under strict safety measures on locations along the West Coast.

In 2024, she remains vice president of the SAG-AFTRA Foundation in Los Angeles.