
Jane Anderson

Jane Anderson (born 1954 in California) is an American actress, playwright, screenwriter and director. She wrote and directed the feature film "The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio" (2005), and wrote the Nicolas Cage film "It Could Happen to You" (1994). She won an Emmy Award for writing the screenplay for the miniseries "Olive Kitteridge" (2014).
Career.
Prior to film directing, Anderson wrote and directed several critically acclaimed television movies, notably "Normal" (2003), starring Jessica Lange and Tom Wilkinson; "The Baby Dance" (1998), starring Stockard Channing and Laura Dern; "The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom" (1993), "When Billie Beat Bobby" starring Holly Hunter; and "If These Walls Could Talk 2" (segment "1961") (2000), which won Vanessa Redgrave an Emmy Award for her portrayal of an elderly lesbian prevented from hospital visitation with her dying long-time companion.
She became a writer for the AMC television drama "Mad Men" for the show's second season. She was nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Dramatic Series for her work on the second season.
In 2015, Anderson wrote the documentary "" about her great aunt, Edith Lake Wilkinson, a lesbian and painter who was institutionalized in the 1920s and spent the rest of her life in an asylum for the mentally ill. Anderson cites Wilkinson as an inspiration for own drawing.
As of 2016, Anderson was working on a project with HBO, partnering again with Frances McDormand following their collaboration on "Olive Kitteridge", to do a miniseries. In 2017, Anderson wrote the Glenn Close-starring "The Wife".