Playview logo

Your own24/7 LIFEBLOGof Entertainment!

Person

Maggie Siff

Actor

1 title

Mini Bio

Maggie Siff (born June 21, 1974) is an American actress. Her television roles have included department store heiress Rachel Menken Katz on the AMC drama Mad Men, Tara Knowles on the FX drama Sons of Anarchy, and psychiatrist Wendy Rhoades on the Showtime series Billions. She has had roles in the films Push (2009) as Teresa Stowe and Leaves of Grass (2010) as Rabbi Renannah Zimmerman. She stars in indie film A Woman, a Part (2016) as well as having a minor role in drama film One Percent More Humid (2017). Siff was born in The Bronx, New York City. Her father is Jewish (from a family from Russia), and her mother is of Irish and Swedish descent; she has said that she feels "culturally Jewish". She is an alumna of The Bronx High School of Science and of Bryn Mawr College, where she majored in English and graduated in 1996. She later completed an M.F.A. in acting at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Acting Program. Shortly after graduating, Siff also worked as a temp at a hedge fund, an experience she drew on for her role in Billions. Siff worked extensively in regional theater before acting in television. She won a Barrymore Award for Excellence in Theater in 1998 for her work in Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts at Lantern Theater Company. Siff started appearing in television series in 2004. She appeared as an Alcoholics Anonymous speaker during an episode of Rescue Me in Season 2. She also had roles on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Grey's Anatomy, and Law & Order. She played Rachel Menken Katz on the series Mad Men from 2007 to 2008, which earned her a nomination, along with the rest of the cast, for a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series. She also appeared in Nip/Tuck during that time, before being cast as Dr. Tara Knowles on Sons of Anarchy in 2008. She has appeared in such films as Then She Found Me (2007) as Lily, Push as a psychic surgeon (called a Stitch) named Teresa Stowe, sent to help Nick (played by Chris Evans), Funny People (2009) as Rachel, Leaves of Grass (2010) as Rabbi Renannah Zimmerman, and Concussion (2013) as Sam Bennet. She appears in the 2016 Showtime series Billions. She starred in an independent indie film called A Woman, A Part (2016) as well as One Percent More Humid (2017). Starting in 2018, Maggie Siff became the television spokesperson for Betterment, an online financial advisor. - IMDb mini biography by: ahmetkozan

Backstage

  • Gave birth, at age 39, to her first child, a daughter Lucy, in April 2014. The child's father is her husband, Paul Ratliff.
  • Maggie Siff appeared on the October 18, 2013, cover of Entertainment Weekly, along with her Sons of Anarchy (2008) costars, Katey Sagal and Charlie Hunnam.
  • She is the cousin of Andrew Siff, a reporter on New York City's NBC show News 4 New York (1980).
  • Her father is of Russian Jewish descent and her mother is of Irish and Swedish ancestry.
  • Siff won a 1998 Barrymore for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Play for the Lantern Theater Company's production of "Ghosts" by H. Ibsen. The same year, she was also nominated for Outstanding Leading Actress (for InterAct Theatre Company's production of "Aunt Dan & Lemon" by Wallace Shawn) and for Best Emerging Philadelphia Theatre Artist.
  • She was nominated for a 2005 Joseph Jefferson Award for Actress in a Principal Role in a Play for "Dollhouse" at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Illinois.
  • She was nominated in 1997 for a Barrymore Award for her work in the Walnut Street Theatre Studio's production of Oleanna.
  • She is the cousin of Andrew Siff, who was an NBC News reporter in New York. She married Paul Ratliff in 2012 and the couple welcomed a daughter in 2014.
  • "\on the strong fan backlash regarding "Tara" on [Sons of Anarchy (2008)\] I think it's a really interesting conversation. I think these shows are always set up so we follow a protagonist and the story is very intricately built around caring for them in some way. And so anybody who runs counter to that is going to run into the problem of people turning on them. But I also think there are pretty deep gender cultural issues that have to do with a certain kind of fantasy of male and female roles, and a certain kind of fantasy around this anti-hero -the man who does terrible, terrible things but wh…"
TV Series

TV Series

(1)