Marc Schauer has worked as a real estate broker in New York for most of his adult life, and since 2009, he has also been married to the actress Laura Linney. The two met years earlier, in 2004, at a film festival in the Colorado town of Telluride. In the two decades since that meeting, Schauer has said almost nothing about any of it in public, an unusual amount of quiet for a man who has spent that same stretch of time turning up in photographs beside a four-time Emmy winner.
That silence has left space for a lot of guessing, some of it repeated so often it now reads as fact. Several biography sites describe him, with real confidence, as someone born and raised in Telluride, Colorado, down to the exact date in 1960. None of it traces back to Schauer, Linney, or anyone who has spoken with either of them directly.
Table of Contents
Quick facts
| Category | Detail |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Real estate broker; also described in a 2017 interview as a drug and alcohol counselor |
| Married | Laura Linney, 2009 |
| Met | September 2004, Telluride Film Festival |
| Son | Bennett Armistead Schauer, born January 8, 2014 |
| Hometown, per Linney | Chicago |
| Widely repeated, unconfirmed | Born in Telluride, Colorado, April 5, 1960 |
A separate note: several search results under this name belong to an unrelated person, a personal injury attorney also named Marc Schauer who practices law in New York and New Jersey. He is not connected to Laura Linney or her family in any way.
What he does for work
Public licensing records from the New York State Department of State confirm Schauer has held a real estate broker’s license, a status anyone can check through the state’s public license search. That matches how he has been described in entertainment coverage for years, as a working real estate agent. A separate 2017 interview in the British publication YOU Magazine described a second line of work, as a drug and alcohol counselor. The two descriptions come from different years and different sources, and nothing about either one rules out someone doing both.
Net worth figures attached to his name usually land somewhere around one million dollars, though none of them trace back to a real source.
How he and Linney met
Telluride is a small mountain town in southwestern Colorado, home to roughly 2,200 people, that fills up every Labor Day weekend when the Telluride Film Festival brings in filmmakers, critics, and a handful of actors. In September 2004, Schauer was working that festival as a V.I.P. host, the person assigned to a visiting guest for the weekend to make sure they got where they needed to be. Linney, who had flown in with her mother, was his assignment.
She has talked about that weekend more than once over the years. In a 2010 interview with The New York Times Magazine, she recalled being caught off guard by her own reaction to him: “Am I attracted to this man? Am I attracted to my handler?”
Nothing came of it that weekend beyond a strong first impression. Afterward, the two kept in touch by email, and later that year they arranged to meet again in Chicago, where Linney was promoting her film Kinsey. That second meeting is where, by her own account, things moved quickly.
It’s also where a common detail about Schauer’s background falls apart. He was working in Telluride when the two met, but he wasn’t from the town originally. In a 2011 interview, while talking about her own college years near Chicago, Linney mentioned that her husband is from that city. It’s a small aside in the interview, but it doesn’t match the specific, confident “Telluride native” backstory that shows up across most articles about him now, one that looks like it grew out of nothing more than the fact that he happened to be working there the weekend they met.
Engaged in 2007, married in 2009
Schauer and Linney got engaged in August 2007. Both People magazine and The Hollywood Reporter confirmed the news within a day of each other.
They married in May 2009, in a private outdoor ceremony on Linney’s property in Connecticut. The actor Liam Neeson, a longtime friend of Linney’s, walked her down the aisle, something he did roughly two months after his own wife, the actress Natasha Richardson, died following a skiing accident.
The couple went back to the Telluride Film Festival together that September, to the town where they had met five years earlier.
A son named for a friend
Their son, Bennett Armistead Schauer, was born January 8, 2014, when Linney was 49. The couple kept the pregnancy private, and People magazine reported the birth nine days later. His middle name honors the writer Armistead Maupin, a close friend of Linney’s since the two worked together on Tales of the City in the early 1990s.
Two decades of photographs, almost no words
Whatever else is unclear about Schauer, the record shows he has kept showing up. Getty Images has more than fifty dated photographs of him with Linney. The earliest is from February 2005, the night of the Academy Awards where she was a Best Supporting Actress nominee for Kinsey. The most recent is from February 2024, at an anniversary event in New York. In between, the photographs run through Tony Awards, Emmy ceremonies, Broadway opening nights, and film festival premieres.
He has said very little in that time. The one clear exception on record came in October 2011, after a visit to Harvard, when Linney sat for a joint interview with the student newspaper’s magazine and Schauer answered a few questions of his own. Asked about being described as having an understated kind of appeal, he laughed and agreed, saying it had stayed “understated enough up until the time I met her.”
Common questions
What does Marc Schauer do for work?
He is a licensed real estate broker in New York. A 2017 interview also described him as a drug and alcohol counselor.
Where is Marc Schauer from?
Chicago, based on Linney’s own description of him in a 2011 interview. He was working in Telluride, Colorado, when the two met, which appears to be where the more common “Telluride native” claim came from.
How old is Marc Schauer?
Not confirmed. A specific birthdate circulates online but does not trace back to any interview, article, or public record.
Does Marc Schauer have social media?
No public account under his name has surfaced.
Sources: The New York Times Magazine (2010); The Harvard Crimson (2011); The Hollywood Reporter; People magazine; New York State Department of State public licensing records; Getty Images.
