Melissa Errico

Born on March 23, 1970, in Manhattan, New York City, actress and singer Melissa Errico spent most of her childhood in Manhasset on Long Island. Music and performance formed a deep family tradition: her maternal grandmother, a lyric soprano who left Italy to work professionally in opera; a great aunt who appeared as a showgirl in The Ziegfeld Follies; her father, once a child prodigy on piano who later became a concert pianist; and her older brother Mike Errico, a singer and songwriter.

She began undergraduate work at Yale University but paused her studies in freshman year after being cast as Cosette in the first national touring company of Les Misérables. She completed a B.A. in art history and philosophy at Yale, then entered the Yale Drama School, only to withdraw after winning the role of Princess Kitty Scherbatsky, with understudy duties for the lead, in a musical adaptation of Anna Karenina; that production gave her a Broadway debut on August 26, 1992. Although the show closed after 46 performances, she returned to Broadway on December 9, 1993, headlining a revival of My Fair Lady that ran 165 performances and brought her a Drama Desk Award nomination. No cast album was made, yet her rendition of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” can be found on the various-artists collection The Musicality of Lerner and Loewe.

In 1995 she took part in a concert staging of Call Me Madam presented by New York City Center’s Encores! Great Musicals in Concert series, later preserved on a DRG Records cast album. During the 1995–1996 television season she joined the cast of Central Park West, and she made her screen debut that year in Loose Women. She returned to Encores! in 1996 to play the title role in a concert version of One Touch of Venus. An off-Broadway revival of The Importance of Being Earnest mounted by the Irish Repertory Theatre of New York in 1997 earned her a second Drama Desk Award nomination. Her next film appearance came in Bury the Evidence in 1998. She starred again on Broadway in a musical adaptation of High Society that opened April 27, 1998, completed 144 performances, received a third Drama Desk Award nomination, and yielded a DRG cast album. On December 19, 1998, she married Patrick McEnroe, a professional tennis player and brother of champion John McEnroe; the two had first met in kindergarten.

She appeared in the films Picture This (1999) and Frequency (2000). In May 2000 she inaugurated a cabaret career at Joe’s Pub with the program Real Emotional Girl: Melissa Errico Sings the Music of Randy Newman, later performing at such New York rooms as the Café Carlyle in March 2002 and the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel in March 2004, as well as in other cities. Additional screen work included Mockingbird Don’t Sing (2001). On March 3, 2001, she joined the Los Angeles tribute Life Upon the Wicked Stage honoring Jerome Kern; her performance of “In Love in Vain” appears on the LML Music album of the same name. On March 23, 2002, she performed at Symphony Space in the Wall to Wall Richard Rodgers celebration, and her duet with Patrick Quinn on “People Will Say We’re in Love” was included on the Fynsworth Alley Records release drawn from that concert. Her next film was Life or Something Like It (2002). In June 2002 she played the principal female role in a Kennedy Center production of Sunday in the Park with George presented at Stephen Sondheim’s invitation. Her subsequent Broadway musical lead arrived with Amour, which opened October 20, 2002, ran 17 performances, earned her a Tony Award nomination, and generated a Sh-K-Boom cast album.

Her first solo album, Blue Like That, appeared on Manhattan/EMI Records on February 25, 2003. On April 14, 2004, she rejoined the Irish Repertory Theatre for a revival of Finian’s Rainbow that produced a Sh-K-Boom cast album and brought her a fourth Drama Desk Award nomination. She next appeared on Broadway in a musical adaptation of Dracula that opened August 19, 2004, and ran 157 performances. In 2005 she acted in the film Loverboy and starred in a Hollywood Bowl revival of Camelot; she also sang the title role on the first studio cast recording of the 1944 musical Sadie Thompson, issued by Original Cast Records on April 12, 2005.

Errico gave birth to a daughter in 2006. That year LML Music released a studio cast album of Anna Karenina, the show of her Broadway debut, with Errico now singing the title role. In 2008 she gave birth to fraternal twins and issued her second solo album, Lullabies & Wildflowers. While raising a family she has sustained an active stage career, appearing in White Christmas on Broadway, starring in an off-Broadway production of Candida that earned a 2010 Drama Desk Award nomination for Best Actress in a Play, reprising Guinevere opposite Jeremy Irons as King Arthur in the Irish Repertory Theatre’s 2011 mounting of Camelot, and headlining with Alec Baldwin in the 2011 Guild Hall production of Gift of the Gorgon. Also in 2011 she released the Phil Ramone-produced Legrand Affair: The Songs of Michel Legrand, featuring music by the noted pianist and arranger Michel Legrand.