How Laura Linney Helped Courtney B. Vance After His Dad Died by Suicide: ‘She Changed My Life’ (Exclusive)

Courtney B. Vance reveals how supportive Laura Linney is as a friend.

Emmy winner People vs. OJ Simpson star, 63, discusses the details of his father’s sudden suicide in 1990 in this week’s issue of PEOPLE. He stars in Six degrees of separation on Broadway at the time, Vance leaned on his New York theater community in the midst of his grief.

“Laura Linney, God bless, she changed my life,” he remembers. “I came back from my mom, taking care of her chores… and the whole company embraced me.” That included Linney, 59, then a stand-in for the theater’s Vivian Beaumont production.

“She said, ‘Courtney, I know this young lady, someone I think you’d really like.'” Linney recommended Vance see massage therapist Gunilla Asp, he recalls. Then Asp introduced him to Margaret Kornfeld, a therapist who would help Vance through the decades-long painful healing process.

“If you don’t take steps, if you don’t start working on wholeness, you’ll never come into your fullness,” says Vance, who has written a new healing guide with psychologist Robin L. Smith, Ph.D., Invisible Pain: Black Men Recognizing Their Pain and Reclaiming Their Power.

Courtney B. Vance in 2023.

Matthew Jordan Smith

About the suicide of his father Conroy, Vance writes in the book: “There is no map of where your thoughts go at such a moment, when you learn that someone without whom you cannot imagine life is now gone, not because of illness or old age, but because he decided to leave us, with his own hand.”

The book also reveals that Vance’s first call after hearing the tragic news was his Six degrees costar Stockard Channing. Despite their vow to never skip a show, she immediately instructed Vance to go home to Detroit and grieve with his family.

After that trip home, Leslie’s mother directed him to seek professional therapy.

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“Thank God I got a mandate from her,” he tells PEOPLE. Finding the right therapist, he admits, “is full of so many reasons to say, ‘Ah, that’s too much work.’ When you’re outside of it, looking in, it’s overwhelming. It’s too much work for the potential payoff.”

But, he continues, “the payoff is you.” Vance’s continued commitment to treatment, however difficult that commitment may be, is what gives him hope. As he writes in the book, “Fortunately, I had my mother who encouraged me to seek counseling, and I had people like Laura Linney and masseuse Gunilla, who led me to Dr. K.”

Invisible Pain: Black Men Recognizing Their Pain and Reclaiming Their Power.

Courtesy of Grand Central Publishing, Balance

Vance is grateful to those communities that provided him with emotional support when he needed it most. WITH Invisible painhe hopes others can begin the process of owning and sharing their pain — especially to reverse what the book categorizes as “the suicide epidemic among our young black men.”

“You have to start somewhere” in regaining mental health, says Vance. “You have wherever you are. And where are you means to start with ‘I’m lost’, to start with ‘I’m in pain.’

“If we can get one person on the edge to say, ‘If he can, where he was, start working, take steps, then maybe I can. Let me reach out as he reached out and find Laura Linney.’

“I keep picking up my girlfriend, Laura Linney,” he adds with a laugh. “I love my girlfriend!”

If you or someone you know needs mental health help, text “STRENGTH” to the text crisis line at 741-741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.

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Source: HIS Education