She decided to test the waters in New York, and after work on the off-Broadway stage in the late 80s, made her Broadway debut with "Prelude to a Kiss" in 1990, where she won the Theatre World Award, the Clarence Derwent Award and a Tony-nomination. Films and TV quickly took over. Dubbed by some as the "long suffering girl next door", she played such noble miserables and cast-asides in Naked in New York (1993), Bullets Over Broadway (1994), Boys on the Side (1995), in which she was the AIDS victim this time, and Let the Devil Wear Black (1999). Preferring quality over quantity, she perfected her craft with offbeat roles in independent features and did not abandon her theatre roots. She copped a slew of acting prizes for her stage work in "How I Learned to Drive" (1996) and, most notably, "Proof" in 2000, wherein she won nearly every award there is to attain, including the prestigious Tony. Unmarried, she did enter into a longtime companionship with actor Billy Crudup after the twosome appeared opposite each other in the 1996 play "Bus Stop". They went their separate ways in 2003.