The Flight Attendant is a story of how an entire life can change in one night. A flight attendant (Cuoco) wakes up in the wrong hotel, in the wrong bed, with a dead man - and no idea what happened.
Neuwirth will recur as Diana Carlisle, a senior partner at the law firm where Annie (Mamet) works. Graceful and hard like polished marble, she's a real mentor to Annie.
Neuwirth was born in Princeton, New Jersey, the daughter of Sydney Anne, an artist, and Lee Paul Neuwirth, a mathematician.
Neuwirth is Jewish and attended the Chapin School of Princeton, but graduated from Princeton High School (a public school) in 1976. She began to study dance at the age of five, and chose it as her field of concentration when she attended Juilliard in New York City in 1976 and 1977. During this period, she performed with the Princeton Ballet Company in Peter and the Wolf, The Nutcracker, and Coppelia and appeared in community theater musicals.
Neuwirth made her Broadway debut in the role of Sheila in A Chorus Line in 1980. She has been featured in revivals of Little Me (1982) Sweet Charity (1986), for which she received a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, and Damn Yankees (1994). It was with the 1996 revival of Chicago, in which she starred as showgirl and killer Velma Kelly, that she gained her greatest stage recognition. Her performance garnered her Tony and Drama Desk Awards as Best Lead Actress in a Musical. She voiced Binky in the series CyberChase. In 2004 she mounted a show, Here Lies Jenny, that featured songs by Kurt Weill, sung and danced by Neuwirth and a four-person supporting cast, as part of an unspoken ambiguous story in an anonymous seedy bar possibly in Berlin in the 1930s. This show was performed in the Zipper Theater on W. 37 St. in New York, initially only at 11 p.m. on weekends. It was eventually expanded to include an earlier show. Here Lies Jenny was also presented by Ms. Neuwirth in San Francisco in 2005. On December 31, 2006, her 48th birthday, Neuwirth returned to the still-running Broadway production of Chicago, this time in the role of Roxie Hart. She also starred in The Addams Family on Broadway.
Her screen credits include Green Card, Bugsy, Say Anything, Jumanji, Summer of Sam, Liberty Heights, Tadpole (for which the Seattle Film Critics named her Best Supporting Actress), How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and The Faculty.
Watch Neuwirth and Ann Reinking perform a song from "Chicago" here:
