MELANIE LYNSKEY - Hitting Her Stride

Melanie Lynskey has her eyes on the prize-the Nobel Peace Prize.

- DANA ROSE FALCONE

"I think it's going to happen," the New Zealand-born star, 46, quips. "I think this is the year."

She kids, but awards love has certainly been pouring in lately, a high point in a 30-year career built on notable roles in series like Two and a Half Men and in movies like Sweet Home Alabama and Don't Look Up. In the past two years alone, Lynskey, who is a mom to her 5-year-old daughter with husband actor Jason Ritter, has been nominated for three Emmys, a SAG Award and multiple Critics' Choice Awards for her performances in Hulu's true-crime drama series Candy, HBO's postapocalyptic thriller The Last of Us and Showtime's survival drama Yellowjackets. With the May 2 debut of her new series, Peacock's The Tattooist of Auschwitz, in which Lynskey plays a biographer telling the story of a real-life Jewish Holocaust survivor, she finds herself standing firmly in the spotlight. "To make a living as an actor was all I ever dreamed of," Lynskey says. "So once it got to a point where I was like, 'Okay, I'm steadily paying the bills through this job,' I felt like my dreams had come true."

Lynskey grew up as the oldest of five siblings in New Zealand with a surgeon father and nurse mother. Shy by nature, Lynskey appeared in a school play that helped her open up, and at age 16, she nabbed her first professional part, a starring role in the 1994 film Heavenly Creatures opposite Kate Winslet. After that, Lynskey continued to work consistently, with turns in Ever After: A Cinderella Story, Coyote Ugly and Up in the Air, as well as episodes of House, Psych and The L Word.