Lenney was born in
New York City to Nelson Gerard Gross and Leah (née Binger) Gross. Her parents divorced in 1958, after which time she lived with her mother, who remarried Ron Lenney. Her surname was legally changed from Gross to Lenney around her sixteenth birthday. She attended
Yale University, graduating with a
B.A. degree in American Studies in 1978. She received a Certificate of Acting from the
Neighborhood Playhouse, where she studied with
Sanford Meisner. She also holds a
Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction from the
Bennington Writing Seminars. In her acting career, Lenney has had a variety of stage, film, and television roles. On television she has appeared on shows such as
Married... with Children (1991),
Murphy Brown,
Judging Amy,
A Fine Romance and
South of Nowhere. Beginning in 1995 she played a recurring role on
ER as Nurse Shirley. In 2006 she coauthored the book
Acting for Young Actors with
Mary Lou Belli. In 2007
University of Nebraska Press published her memoir,
Bigger than Life: A Murder, a Memoir, which recounts her experience of learning that her father,
Nelson G. Gross, had been kidnapped and murdered in September 1997. Her book
The Object Parade, a collection of 32 personal essays which first appeared in publications including
Creative Nonfiction,
AGNI and the
Harvard Review, was first published in 2014. Writing in the
Los Angeles Review of Books, Ned Stuckey-French described
The Object Parade as an "essay collection [disguised] as a memoir, though perhaps it's the other way around." ==Family==