Background and career
Julia Sweeney (born October 1958) is an American actress and comedian. She gained fame as a cast member on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live from 1990 to 1994. She played Mrs. Keeper in the film Stuart Little and voiced Brittany in Father of the Pride. She appeared in the Hulu series Shrill, the Showtime series Work in Progress, and the Starz series American Gods. Sweeney also had a recurring role on Frasier.
Sweeney was born and raised in Spokane, Washington, the daughter of Robert Mark Sweeney and Jeraldine "Jeri" Sweeney (née Ivers). Her father was an attorney and federal prosecutor, while her mother was a homemaker. She has an Irish Catholic background. As a child, she was drawn to imitating voices and inventing characters. She attended Marycliff High School and Gonzaga Preparatory School, where she appeared in a number of plays. She graduated with a double major in economics and European history from the University of Washington, where she was student body vice president and became a member of Delta Gamma sorority. After graduation, Sweeney moved to Los Angeles, where she worked as an accountant for Columbia Pictures and United Artists.
In 1988, while still working as an accountant, Sweeney enrolled in classes with the improvisational comedy troupe the Groundlings, eventually being selected to be part of the troupe's Sunday Company. It was at the Groundlings that she began to develop characters, which she would later bring to the stage, film, and television. They include Mea Culpa, the title character of Mea's Big Apology (co-written by then-husband Stephen Hibbert), which won the Best Written Play Award from L.A. Weekly in 1988, and has been developed by Sweeney (in collaboration with Jim Emerson) into a screenplay; and the androgynous Pat.
At a Groundlings performance in 1989, she was offered a spot as one of Saturday Night Live's featured players. She joined the regular Saturday Night Live cast the following year and remained with the show through four seasons, from 1990 to 1994. Her most popular character was Pat, whose impossible-to-determine gender was the basis for Sweeney's popular It's Pat! sketches on Saturday Night Live, and a later feature film of the same name, which was a critical and commercial failure, costing $8 million to make but grossing only $60,822 at the box office.
After leaving the cast of Saturday Night Live, Sweeney returned to Los Angeles where, shortly afterwards, her career was put on hold by a series of personal traumas. Her brother Michael was diagnosed with lymphoma, and shortly thereafter Sweeney discovered that she too had cancer. Her brother did not survive the cancer. Throughout the ordeal, Sweeney told stories of her experiences in serio-comic performances at L.A.'s alternative comedy club, the Un-Cabaret, eventually developing the stories into a one-woman stage show called God Said Ha!, which debuted at San Francisco's Magic Theater in 1995. God Said Ha! moved to Broadway, winning the 1996 New York Comedy Festival's Audience Award, and a CD recording of the show earned her a Grammy nomination for Best Comedy Album that same year. Miramax released a film version of the show in 1998, directed by Sweeney and produced by Quentin Tarantino. The film earned the Golden Space Needle Award at the Seattle International Film Festival, and was released on DVD in 2003. Portions of the monologues from Un-Cabaret were featured on episode 9 of This American Life (then known as Your Radio Playhouse) in January 1996. Since her initial monologue, she has appeared on three more This American Life episodes.
Sweeney's second monologue chronicled the adoption of her daughter from China. In the Family Way started on stage in New York City in early 2003 at the Ars Nova Theatre. The show was directed by Broadway stage director Mark Brokaw, before migrating to the Groundlings Theatre in Los Angeles. Sweeney has also released a CD recording of In the Family Way and, in 2006, performed a 25-minute excerpt of the show at the Hollywood Bowl with a new orchestration written especially for her piece by composer Anthony Marinelli and performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
