Miriam Silverman is an American actress. She is also known for her recurring role as Bernice in the Amazon series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and her performances in Hulu's Fleishman Is in Trouble (2022) and Amazon's Dead Ringers (2023). She won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play in the 2023 revival of the Lorraine Hansberry play The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. She is an acting coach, and currently an adjunct teacher at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
Silverman was raised in New York City in Manhattan, the daughter of Anita (née Palm 1942âÂÂ2023). and Michael Silverman. During her mother's pregnancy, Anita was featured on a special segment of Good Morning America documenting Miriam's birth.
She has two brothers, Joseph and Jeffrey. Her mother was a teacher and her father is a journalist and former managing editor of the Associated Press. She attended Bronx High School of Science graduating in 1996. Her interest in acting started at a young age, with her parents taking her to see Broadway shows. She played Rizzo in a school production of Grease and played soccer. She auditioned for LaGuardia High School For The Performing Arts and was accepted, however she turned down the offer and enrolled at Bronx Science, taking the subway from Manhattan.
Silverman graduated from Brown University with a B.A. in Literature and Southeast Asian studies in 2001 and completed a Master of Fine Arts in Acting in 2005. Her first acting role at Brown was Lady Croom in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. She worked at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden between college semesters.
She took a gap year as an undergraduate to teach English in Hong Kong. In 2012, through a fellowship with Theatre Communications Group, she moved to London to train at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
In 2002 she performed in the musical Hot Star, Nebraska at Speakeasy Stage in Boston. In 2008 she performed in a production of Hamlet at the Delacorte Theater. In 2010, she was nominated for a Helen Hayes Award for her performance in The Dog in the Manger with the Shakespeare Theatre Company, where Silverman is a repertory member actor. Silverman is also a repertory member actor for Trinity Repertory Company. She has performed several plays in summerstock in the Berkshires with companys like Berkshire on Stage and the Berkshire Playwrights Lab.
She was nominated for a Jeff Award in 2016 for her performance as the lead female character's older sister Mavis Parodus Bryson in the Goodman Theatre's production of Lorraine Hansberry's The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. She reprised this role in the New York productions at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and then on Broadway in April 2023 at the James Earl Jones Theatre. For her performance in the Broadway production, she won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play.
She made her Broadway debut in 2017 as Amy in Ayad Akhtar's ' at the Vivian Beaumont Theater. Her television appearances including episodes of Fleishman Is in Trouble and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. She appeared in the film Breaking which premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. In 2023, Silverman was cast in her first leading film role in Motherland produced by Moving Picture Institute.
She married actor Adam Green in 2009. The couple met performing Awake and Sing! at the Arena Stage, directed by Zelda Fichandler. Green, a Harvard graduate, works as the East Coast Union organizer for SAG-AFTRA. The couple lobbied for the Actors' Equity Fair Wage on Stage movement. She is Jewish and a member of the Plaza Jewish Community Chapel.