Jessica Phyllis Lange is an American actress. Known for her roles on stage and screen she has received numerous accolades and is one of the few performers to achieve the Triple Crown of Acting. Lange has received two Academy Awards, three Primetime Emmy Awards, five Golden Globe Awards, and a Tony Award as well as nominations for a BAFTA Award and a Olivier Award.
Jessica Phyllis Lange was born on April 20, 1949, in Cloquet, Minnesota. Her father, Albert John Lange, was a teacher and traveling salesman, and her mother, Dorothy Florence (née Sahlman), was a housewife. She has two older sisters, Jane and Ann, and a younger brother, George. Her paternal ancestry is German and Dutch, her maternal ancestry Finnish.
Due to the nature of her father's professions, her family moved more than a dozen times to various towns and cities in Minnesota before settling down in her hometown, where she graduated from Cloquet High School.
In 1967, she received a scholarship to study art and photography at the University of Minnesota, where she met and began dating Spanish photographer Paco Grande. After the two married in 1970, Lange dropped out of college to pursue a more bohemian lifestyle, traveling through the United States and Mexico in a microbus with Grande. The pair then moved to Paris, where they drifted apart. While in Paris, Lange studied mime theater under the supervision of Étienne Decroux and joined the Opéra-Comique as a dancer. She later studied acting with Mira Rostova and at HB Studio in New York City.
