The 411 - Sharon Epatha Merkerson

Sharon Epatha Merkerson (born 28 November 1952 in Saginaw, Michigan), is a Tony Award-nominated and Emmy Award-winning American actress. She is best known as Lieutenant Anita Van Buren (1993-present) on the long-running television crime drama Law & Order. At present she has been on the show longer than any other cast member. As of the 366th episode in the 16th season, she is the first actress to appear in 300 episodes.

The youngest of five children, she was raised in Detroit, where she graduated from Cooley High School in 1970. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from Wayne State University and began her New York theater career in 1978.

Merkerson was nominated for a Tony as Best Actress for her performance as Berniece in The Piano Lesson and won an Obie Award in 1992 for her work in I'm Not Stupid.

Her screen credits include Jacob's Ladder, Loose Cannons, She's Gotta Have It and James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day, in which she played the terrified wife of Joe Morton.

Merkerson made her television debut as Reba the Mail Lady on Pee Wee's Playhouse, and has appeared on The Cosby Show, among other series. But her single most important television appearance may have been in the first-season Law and Order episode "Mushrooms," in which she portrayed the grief-stricken mother of an 11-month-old boy who is shot accidentally. Her performance was not only memorable to the audience during that key first season, but also impressed the producers enough to select Merkerson to replace Dann Florek as detective squad chief in the series' fourth season.

In 2006, she won Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards for her performance in the television movie Lackawanna Blues, her first starring role.

She is an outspoken advocate against smoking and for lung cancer research and awareness.

Merkerson is often reticent about revealing what her first name really is -- Sharon. On the June 11, 2005 episode of NPR's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!, she jokingly claimed that the initial "S," "stands for 'Sweet' [because] so many people have difficulty with Epatha, which is what I prefer to be called."

*From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia