Celebrity Movie Blog

Who is Maggie Gyllenhaal?

Maggie Gyllenhaal was born November 16th, 1977 in New York City into a show business family. Younger brother Jake Gyllenhaal (Donnie Darko, Brokeback Mountain) is an actor, father Stephen Gyllenhaal is a director, and mother is screenwriter Naomi Foner. These relations started all her early success for her first acting role was in a movie directed by her father Waterland (1992) as a character even named Maggie. Then she appeared as sister to Donnie Darko, her actual brother, in 2001. Maggie first achieved recognition on her own in the 2002 movie Secretary in which she stars as the films sado-masochistic (but romantic and comedic, if darkly so) secretary. The film received an impressive 14 award wins, and 14 award nominations. Since then, Maggies increasingly A-list (at least, junior level A-list) careers steamrolled ahead with one massive bump from which she managed to deftly recover. Shes appeared in 40 Days and 40 Nights (2002), Adaptation (2002), starring Nicolas Cage, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002) starring George Clooney and Mona Lisa Smile (2003) with Julia Roberts. She was however, massively attacked for remarks she made about the 9/11 tragedy which she felt were only trying to explore U.S. policies that led to the attack, not suggest the attacks were by any means justified. Later she apologized for her poor timing and the way the remarks were perceived. When she was allowed to portray the living wife of a hero who perished that day in the movie World Trade Center (2006), and the real life wife of the fallen hero accepted Maggie in the role it appeared that she had been forgiven. Gyllenhaal has a baby girl with fellow actor Peter Sarsgaard.