Sally Murphy (actress)
Sally Murphy is an American actress and singer. She has appeared in plays and musicals on Broadway, off-Broadway and regional theatre, including The Grapes of Wrath, Carousel, Fiddler on the Roof and August: Osage County. She has been a Steppenwolf Theatre Company member since 1993 and appeared in several of their productions. She has also appeared in films and on television.
Early life and education
Murphy is the only child of Edward, an electrician, and Pat Murphy, a social worker. She grew up in Auburn Gresham, Chicago, Illinois. As a young child she did skits with neighborhood friends and studied piano. She appeared in school shows in junior high school and starred in musical performances and theater at Lincoln-Way High School in New Lenox, from which she graduated in 1980. She majored in voice at Northwestern University graduating in 1984.Career
After college, she performed in plays in Chicago, working with the Goodman Theatre in 1986. Three years later, she played Rose of Sharon in Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, along with Steppenwolf co-founder Gary Sinese and Lois Smith. She repeated this role at La Jolla Playhouse, London’s National Theatre, and then Cort Theatre on Broadway. She also appeared in the television adaptation of the play for the PBS series American Playhouse in 1991. In the 1994 Broadway revival of the musical Carousel, Murphy played Julie Jordan alongside Audra McDonald as Carrie Pipperidge.In 1995, after Murphy saw the hit play Skylight at London's National Theatre, she told Steppenwolf management she wanted to bring the play there, struck by its dramatic presentation of a relationship on stage and challenging role for the lead actress. Steppenwolf produced the play in 1997 with Murphy as Kyra Hollis.
In 2001 at the Vineyard Theatre, she portrayed Susan Smith in Cornelius Eady's two character play Brutal Imagination, which centers on the real-life 1994 case of Smith, a white woman from South Carolina who falsely claimed that an African American man had kidnapped her two young sons; she had drowned them herself. Joe Morton played the imaginary Black man Smith invented to blame for the crime. The actors reunited in 2025 to do a one night reading with proceeds benefiting the Innocence Project. She appeared in the The Apple Family plays as the character Jane Apple in Regular Singing, reprising the role in a Zoom format in 2020 when theaters were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Murphy has been a member of Steppenwolf since 1993. Her credits there include The Common Pursuit, The Grapes of Wrath, Skylight, Uncle Vanya, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Royal Family, August: Osage County, Sex with Strangers, Time Stands Still, The Minutes, and Linda Vista. Her Broadway credits include The Grapes of Wrath, Carousel, The Wild Party, Fiddler on the Roof, August: Osage County, Linda Vista, and The Minutes. She was nominated for the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Musical in 2015 for her performance as Jenny in The Threepenny Opera.
She also appeared in several films between 1992 and 2001.