From her Broadway debut in the distinctive ensemble musical comedy Pump Boys and Dinettes in 1982, to her later television appearances in the unusual ensemble mystery television series devoted to Nero Wolfe, and her subsequent appearances as Louise O’Malley in Grey’s Anatomy, Debra Monk has long proven to be the acting equivalent of a “team” player.
Appearing in both stage plays and musicals, Monk has performed both on and off-Broadway. She appeared in the original 1990 production of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins at Playwright’s Horizons in New York, creating the role of Sara Jane Moore, the second woman who had attempted to kill President Gerald Ford in 1975 within the span of just seventeen days. After being featured in the short-lived Nick and Nora, a 1990 musical based on Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, Monk performed in several stage plays – including a Tony Award®-winning performance as Geneva in Lanford Wilson’s 1993 play, Redwood Curtain.
In 1997, Debra Monk was nominated for a Tony® for her performance as Shelby Stevens in the Kander and Ebb musical, Steel Pier. More recently, in 2007, Monk starred as Carmen Bernstein in Kander and Ebb’s Curtains, with a book by Rupert Holmes.
