Bio

Dana was most recently seen on Broadway in The Importance of Being Ernest. She appeared in Butley (Tony nomination), at Lincoln Center in The Rivals (Tony nomination) and Henry IV; and she played Big Mama in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. She has starred in two of Alfred Uhry’s prize-winning plays: The Last Night of Ballyhoo (Drama Desk Award and a Tony nomination), and Driving Miss Daisy (Obie and Outer Critics Circle Awards) She starred in Christopher Durang’s Sex and Longing (Drama Desk Award). Miss Ivey’s other Tony nominations were for her roles in Heartbreak House and Sunday in the Park with George, both of which were also made for PBS/Showtime. She was in Present Laughter with George C. Scott (Drama Desk nomination and the Clarence Derwent Award). Other Broadway shows include Waiting in the Wings with Lauren Bacall, The Marriage of Figaro, Pack of Lies, Indiscretions, Major Barbara, and A Day in the Death of Joe Egg.  Off-Broadway, she was in The Uneasy Chair and The Savannah Disputation at Playwrights Horizons. For her performance in Quartermaine’s Terms she received her first Obie. For the New York Shakespeare Festival she played in Wenceslas Square, Tartuffe in Central Park, and was Gertrude in Kevin Kline’s Hamlet,  also seen on PBS “Great Performances.” She appeared at the Manhattan Theatre Club in John Patrick Shanley’s Beggars in the House of Plenty and returned to MTC to play in Kindertransport. She received another Obie for Mrs. Warren’s Profession at the Irish Repertory Theatre. At New York Stage and Film, she starred in both Tom Donaghy’s Minutes From the Blue Route and John Patrick Shanley’s A Fool and Her Fortune; and at the Williamstown Theatre Festival she starred in The Glass Menagerie, The Rivals, Under Milkwood, and Home.  She toured in A Cheever Evening by A.R.Gurney, and appeared in the British premiere of In the Summerhouse at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, London. She starred in the TV movie A Child Lost Forever, in the NBC sitcom “Easy Street” and in the HBO  movie Mohammed Ali’s Greatest Fight. She appeared in the HBO Emmy-winning movie A Lesson Before Dying, and in “Homicide, “B.L.Stryker,” “Oz,” and “Law and Order.”  Her films include The Help, The Color Purple, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Postcards From the Edge, Home Alone 2, The Addams Family, Addams Family Values, Sleepless in Seattle, Huck Finn, Guilty As Sin, Explorers, The Scarlet Letter, Sabrina, The Impostors, Simon Birch, Mumford, Disney’s THE KID,  Walking Across  Egypt, Orange County, Two Weeks Notice, Legally Blonde 2, and Ghost Town. She has performed with The Eos Orchestra, The little Orchestra Society, and Musica Viva in New York City, and with the Chamber Orchestra of Washington, DC at the Kennedy Center. Miss Ivey was a classical music DJ for three years in Atlanta, GA. In 2008, she was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame, and received an honorary doctorate from Rollins College.