Mariel Hemingway’s first role was with her real-life sister Margaux (also in her debut role) in the film Lipstick (1976), in which they played sisters. She received notice for her acting and was nominated as “Best Newcomer” for the Golden Globe Award that year. Her highest-profile role was in Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
In Personal Best (1982), she played a bisexual track-and-field athlete in a film noted for its same-sex love scenes. In connection with Personal Best, she appeared in a nude pictorial in the April 1982 issue of Playboy and was on the cover.
She starred as Dorothy Stratten alongside Eric Roberts in Star 80 (1983), a film about the Playboy model’s life and murder.
She was featured in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987) as Lacy Warfield. Subsequently released additional footage showed an expansion of her role. She also co-starred in the 1991–93 ABC series Civil Wars. She was cast as the female lead in Darren Star’s CBS drama Central Park West for the 1995–96 season. In 1996, she had a leading role in the British TV movie September, playing the wife of Michael York.
She has played a lesbian or bisexual woman in several films and television shows, including Personal Best, The Sex Monster, In Her Line of Fire, and episodes of the TV series Roseanne (“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and “December Bride”) and Crossing Jordan. Hemingway is heterosexual, but has said she formed a “big connection with the LGBT community” after Personal Best and enjoys taking roles in “cutting-edge” productions.
She is currently the host of Spiritual Cinema, a monthly television show dedicated to spiritual films. She has begun hosting a series of yoga practice videos known as Yoga Now, with guru Rodney Yee.
Hemingway worked on the documentary film Running from Crazy, directed by Barbara Kopple and produced by the Oprah Winfrey Network chronicling the Hemingway family’s history of suicide, substance abuse and mental illness, shown at the Sundance Film Festival in 2013. In October 2013, Hemingway received a humanitarian award from the San Diego Film Festival for her role in the documentary.