Award-winning actress to teach at Florida State

    (KRT) She’s been nominated for Tony Awards, Emmys Awards, four Oscars and butted heads with politicians such as Newt Gingrich and Jesse Helms.

   Starting in the fall, Jane Alexander, the acclaimed actress and former chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts, can add the title of Florida State University Francis Eppes Professor to her impressive resume.

   “I’m thrilled about teaching,” Alexander said Wednesday from her hotel room in Seattle, where she is rehearsing for a production of Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra.

   The Alexander appointment is actually a package deal because her husband, director-producer Edwin Sherin (Law and Order), is joining his wife at FSU as a theater professor thanks to the The Reynolds Chair.

   “We both wanted to teach at a large, public university, not a small college,” Alexander said.

   Alexander, 62, first gained wide attention in the late ’60s after she won a Tony Award for her role in the play The Great White Hope. She reprised her part in the 1970 film version of Great White Hope and received her first Oscar nomination.

   She has since been nominated three more times for Academy Awards for her work in All the President’s Men (1976), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and Testament (1983).