Marc Schauer is the husband of actress Laura Linney, and has been since 2009. For most of that time, he was described in interviews and photo captions as a real estate agent. In 2019, The New York Times called him a drug and alcohol counsellor instead. No article, including that one, has ever explained the change. In more than two decades of public record, Schauer has barely spoken for himself.
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Meeting at the Telluride Film Festival
In 2004, Linney travelled to the Telluride Film Festival with her mother for the premiere of Kinsey. Schauer was working locally in real estate and had also signed on as a festival volunteer.
‘He was the guy who said, “Hi, welcome to Telluride,”‘ Linney told The New York Times in 2010. ‘He was a V.I.P. host, a liaison between the town and the festival. He was assigned to me for the weekend.’
They stayed in touch by email afterward, and the exchange led to a plan to meet in Chicago during her press tour for the film. ‘I got out of the elevator and I turned and I looked at him and every anxiety just vanished,’ she told the Times. ‘And I thought, oh, this is going to be fine.’
The story of how they met, like almost everything else written about their marriage, comes from Linney’s own account. Schauer gave one interview alongside her, to The Harvard Crimson in 2011, in which Linney mentions that he is from Chicago originally, not Colorado. In that same conversation, talking about staying in together on quiet nights, Schauer called it ‘a cultural spa weekend for us when we get to watch TV and movies.’ It is one of the only times his own voice appears anywhere in the record.
A wedding two months after tragedy
The wedding took place in May 2009, an outdoor ceremony on Linney’s property in Connecticut. It came two months after the death of her close friend, actress Natasha Richardson, who died that March in a skiing accident. Richardson’s husband, the actor Liam Neeson, walked Linney down the aisle. Novelist Armistead Maupin, a longtime friend who attended, later described the day to the Times.
‘It was an astonishing moment, a celebration of love and loss, being given equal treatment.’
What changed about Marc Schauer’s career
For years, every published description of Schauer was the same. Frank Bruni’s 2010 profile of Linney in the Times called him ‘a local real estate agent.’ Photo captions from the years before that, including one from the Academy Awards in February 2008, describe him the same way.
By 2019, that had changed. In a Times interview about Linney’s return to Tales of the City, the reporter Kathryn Shattuck described her husband, in a single clause, as ‘a drug and alcohol counselor.’ The sentence moved straight on to their son, and none of the coverage since has returned to the change.
Selling property and counselling people through addiction are different kinds of work. One closes on a transaction. The other means sitting, often for years, with people at some of the worst moments of their lives. Whatever moved Schauer from one into the other happened sometime in those nine years, between two sentences in the same newspaper.
Why so little is known about Marc Schauer
There is a specific, documented reason so little about him has ever come out. In the early 2000s, Linney was tracked for years by a stalker. He sent letters to her mother and her publicist, and turned up wherever she travelled, including once while she was teaching in Alaska. Police eventually got involved. Bruni’s 2010 profile notes that afterward, Linney made her husband and family off limits to interviews, an arrangement that appears to have held since.
Celebrity websites have filled that gap on their own. Search Schauer’s name today and several will hand you a birth date, a hometown and a net worth for him, none of which trace back to anything he or Linney has said. Neither his age nor his net worth has ever been disclosed, by him or by her, on the record. A search for his name currently also returns, on the first page of results, the LinkedIn profile of an unrelated New York attorney who happens to share it.
Marc Schauer and Laura Linney today
Schauer and Linney are still married. They were photographed together backstage at the Broadway production of Good Night, and Good Luck in May 2025. Their son, Bennett Armistead Schauer, born in January 2014 and given a middle name after Maupin, is now a teenager. Linney continues to work steadily, including a new series, American Classic, which began on MGM+ earlier this year.
As Laura Linney’s husband, Schauer has appeared in press photographs at nearly every major event of her career for two decades, though he has rarely said anything in front of a reporter. On the occasions he has, the tone tends to be self-deprecating. Watching a 2010 scene from The Big C being filmed, in which Idris Elba, playing her character’s love interest, spoke in a British accent some of the women in the room found appealing, Schauer joked, ‘I hadn’t heard the accent before. Now it’s even more emasculating.’ He added, ‘The worst I ever felt was at the Oscar luncheon, when Javier Bardem and George Clooney walked by. It was like: I’m not even here.’
In 2023, Linney told People that he still comments on her outfit choices on the way out the door. ‘My husband will look at me as I’m about to walk out the door and go, “Really?”‘ she said.
That is close to the full extent of what Marc Schauer has said, or been quoted saying, in public. What changed about his career, and why, still is not part of it.
