Brown University graduate Laura Linney has been nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her role in the movie, The Savages.

The Washington Post / Nikki Kahn

On-screen, Laura Linney rarely enjoys the more obviously transformative roles that so many actresses clamor for — the kinds that require wigs or prostheses or bulletproof bracelets. She’s the nameless prosecutor, the cool FBI supervisor, the long-suffering wife, but never Marie Antoinette, Virginia Woolf or Wonder Woman. And in the current The Savages, for which she snagged a Best Actress Oscar nomination, she’s a lowercase being again, an emotionally immature daughter trying to find a nursing home for her estranged father.

But even though Linney’s characters tend to show up for grunt duty in the real world rather than blaze a path through it, they’re transformative in other, equally powerful ways. Story details that may sit indifferently on the page become — in Linney’s hands — defining moments. In her subtly transcendental way, Linney embodies Thoreau’s “quiet lives of desperation.”

Her subtleties are hard to capture in words, but on-screen they’re writ large. Listen to her tremulous cadence as Sammy Prescott — the tightly wound single mother having an extramarital affair in 2000’s You Can Count on Me — as she asks her priest: “What is the church’s official position on fornication and adultery?” And as the soon-to-be-divorced Joan Berkman in 2005’s The Squid and the Whale, there’s her flustered but determined sense of purpose as she stashes her favorite books under her son’s bed, determined her husband won’t take away those aspects of her identity.

Asked about her methods, Linney seems to default to a familiar playbook in her answers. It’s a matter of researching the characters, she says, then being improvisationally available to her fellow performers, no matter what they do.

“You don’t know where it’s going to go,” says Linney, 43. “You have no idea. And that’s exciting and that’s fun.”

If Linney is short on self-explication, her colleagues are more effusive. Those who have worked with Linney — and with a tally of some 30 films in 15 years, there are many — point to her hard work, enormous range and a quick-thinking ability to surprise. They will tell you, almost unanimously: There’s so much more to Linney than that nice-girl-from-Connecticut mien.

Barry Levinson, who directed her in last year’s Man of the Year, says: “In very small increments she can become someone else. It’s not like she has to totally change her hair to be a different person.”

His example: While playing a frazzled whistle-blower, Linney “went to order this cappuccino and you sensed this anxiety around her. There’s a moment when she spilled the coffee and someone tried to help her, and she exploded with a level of anger that made you go, holy God, that was an almost frightening moment. And I thought, she doesn’t need a change of wardrobe or makeup but, within herself, there’s a wide bandwidth to play with.”

Savages writer and director Tamara Jenkins says, “Her pores are so open to the little details.” Jenkins recalls a scene in which Linney’s character “clicks on a bedside light and steps back and admires the glow. On this particular lamp, there are these cheap little dangling beads. And she pats them so they jingle and she steps back. There’s something so girl-like about it. She’s a little bit self-satisfied, a little charmed. It was sweet. And all of it in that one selection of a gesture.”

Laura Linney is the actress who makes viewers remember movie minutiae. The patting of those beads. The rising pique in her voice in Breach, when she asks a fellow FBI agent, “What’s the trouble?” And the way she slaps her son’s cheek with such delicate surprise in The Squid and the Whale.

Linney, her associates agree, delights in the acting process with an academic, almost Talmudic intensity. This is hardly surprising, given her background. Daughter of prominent playwright Romulus Linney, she was the hardest working student in her Juilliard class, according to former teacher Michael Kahn. (“She wasn’t always the flashiest but I think she absorbed and profited the most.”) And even now, she carries recordings of acting guru Michael Chekhov on her iPod, ready to access anytime, even handing over the ear buds to a reporter, encouraging a listen.

That excitement for things thespian is clear in Linney’s dramatic posture changes as she jaunts into the Studio Theatre, where she has agreed to be interviewed one recent weekday morning.

Her stride lengthens, her eyes glisten, she seems filled with a giddy — dare we say geeky? — effervescence.

“It’s just my favorite place in the world to be,” she says, settling into a seat in the Milton Theatre upstairs. She’s tickled by the “ghost light” illuminating the stage, asks the staff if there’s a “black box” theater, wants to know about the “intimacy of the performance spaces.” The theater “taught me much of what I believe. My belief system. It taught me about problem solving and honesty and discipline and creativity and imagination. About true and false. It taught me all the things that I hold really dear.”

At 10, her father found her a summer job hanging lights and building props at New Hampshire’s New London Barn Playhouse.

“Keep her there for two days,” she recalls her father telling the playhouse director. “Work her to death and she’ll come home.”

Linney liked the work so much she came back for three consecutive summer stints, pulling 15-hour days and feeling “happy, happy, happy.”

Did she ever come home again? “No,” says Linney. “I found home.”

Linney, whose parents were divorced when she was an infant, was raised in Manhattan by her mother, a nurse, who always told her “to never be afraid to be myself. As hokey as that sounds, it’s slogans like that that do give you a bit of a backbone.”

Her father was always available for dramaturgical consultation during her college years (she graduated from Brown University in 1986 before moving on to Julliard). “I could call him on the phone and say, ‘I do not understand Ibsen.’ And I would get these gorgeous, fantastic lectures on the other side of the phone.”

After graduating from Juilliard, Linney assumed she’d work an apprenticeship in the sticks before returning, one triumphant day, to New York. But when she was offered the role of understudy for Tess in John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation on Broadway, she stayed in her home town. And after getting minor parts in 1992’s Lorenzo’s Oil and 1993’s Dave, Linney realized a film career — particularly the sort of character-driven indie movies built around performance — was possible, too.

“It’s been very strange that film has become such a big part of my life,” says Linney. “Because that is time I thought I’d be spending in the theater.”

Whether on the stage or the screen, one part of the acting craft Linney often returns to in the interview is the crucial nature of “connection,” the process of give-and-take between performers.

“There’s a connection made when you’re working in the arts, as an actor, dancer or musician,” says Linney. “When you’re interdependent on one another, you become close in a way that you don’t in any other profession. You just don’t. You rely on each other and you’re vulnerable with each other. You’re kind to each other and you’re harsh.”

And the secret to this connection? “Simple. Just listening to each other, because, if you’re truly listening, any decision you make is the right one. You usually get about 10 seconds of this feeling, if you’re lucky,” she says with a ringing laugh that fills every nook of the theater. “But the moment you think about how connected you are, you’re not.”

The connection sometimes extends into real life. Linney has enduring relationships, she says, with Jeff Daniels (her narcissistic husband in The Squid and the Whale), Philip Seymour Hoffman (her co-star in The Savages) and Liam Neeson, who performed with Linney in Kinsey and a 2002 Broadway production of The Crucible. And her experience working with Mark Ruffalo on You Can Count on Me was so intense, she recently told Entertainment Weekly, “I always see him and I always tear up.”

Asked about this, she explains: “I tear up around Mark because of what a pure and wonderful person he is. I have never met anyone like him. He’s a warm, unique human being and he touches me deeply.”

She pauses, weighing her words.

“That was a very difficult, weird time making that movie. It was fantastic. Some of the best material I’ve worked on, and there was stuff in my life that was difficult. And he was wonderful.”

That friendship took place just before her divorce with stage actor David Adkins (they were married in 1995), we observe.

“It was before,” she responds. “I had had my house burn down. It was just one of those years. My life was seismically changing and I wasn’t even aware of it. I had no idea that my marriage was about to fall apart. And unfortunately it did.”

She declines to discuss this further, or her recent engagement to Colorado real estate agent Marc Schauer. “I’m being protective,” she explains. “It’s not easy to have your name all over the papers.”

Daniels says Linney’s attention to connection enhances other performers’ work as well: “Too many actors act like they’re in front of the mirror. Laura takes down the mirror. Her reactions are as important to her as her actions. And she makes you better. ... Meryl (Streep) is the only one that does it this well — that back and forth.”

Like Streep, Linney is often categorized as an actor’s actor. Respected, revered within the trade. And yet her many awards don’t include an Oscar, though she’s been nominated twice (for You Can Count on Me and Kinsey) and has two Emmys. Perhaps she’ll get to grip that golden statuette if she ever chooses to work from the outward in, rather than the inside out.

That would mean considering those exclamation point roles — an alcoholic, perhaps? Or a prostitute. Or anyone in a big, flowing gown.