She starred in the Christmas Cottage, a story of the early artistic beginnings of the Painter of Light, Thomas Kinkade. In the film Home, Harden’s co-stars include her daughter, Eulala Scheel. Gay appeared in Home playing a woman who has had a mastectomy in 2008. Also the same year, Harden shared top billing with Kevin Bacon in Rails & Ties which is the directorial debut of Alison Eastwood. Gay appeared in several films, including Sean Penn’s Into the Wild and Frank Darabont’s The Mist (opposite Thomas Jane and Laurie Holden), based on the novella by Stephen King in 2007. She then reprised the role in the series’ eighth-season premiere and also again in the twelfth-season episode “Penetration” as a rape victim (aired November 10, 2010).
This role earned her her first Emmy Award nomination for best guest actress in a drama series in 2007. She guest-starred as FBI undercover agent Dana Lewis posing as a white-supremacist in “Raw” which is an episode of the popular crime drama Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Harden was again nominated in the same category for Mystic River in 2003.
She was awarded the 2000 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of painter Lee Krasner in Pollock (2000).
Her notable film roles include the Disney sci-fi comedy Flubber (1997) which is a popular hit in which she co-starred with Robin Williams the supernatural drama Meet Joe Black (1998), playing the under-appreciated daughter of a tycoon (Anthony Hopkins, co-starring Brad Pitt) She has also cast in Labor of Love (1998), a Lifetime television movie in which she starred with David Marshall Grant and also Space Cowboys (2000), an all-star adventure-drama about aging astronauts. Throughout the 1990s, Harden continued to appear in films and television. She played actress Ava Gardner alongside Philip Casnoff as Frank Sinatra in the made for TV miniseries Sinatra in 1992.
Even so, at the time, living in New York City, Harden had to go back to doing catering jobs “because I didn’t have any money”. Harden appeared in the Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing (1990)which is a 1930s mobster drama in which she first gained wide exposure. She also appeared in The Imagemaker (1986), her first movie screen role, in which she played a stage manager. Harden appeared in several television programs, including Simon & Simon, Kojak, and CBS Summer Playhouse throughout the 1980s. Her first film role was in a 1979 student-produced movie at the University of Texas.