Biographie

Between her TV debut at age 7 on Pee-wee's Playhouse (1986) and playing junkie Nicky on Orange Is the New Black (2013), Natasha fought, and kicked, an addiction to heroin. After getting clean, she underwent open-heart surgery to repair the damage she'd inflicted on her body during this period.

Her parents are both of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Her maternal grandparents, Ella (Netzer) and Morris Buchinger, both originally from Hungary, were Holocaust survivors.

Rufus Wainwright's song "Natasha" is written about her.

In 2005 Lyonne was admitted to Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan under a pseudonym, suffering from hepatitis C, a heart infection, and a collapsed lung; she was also undergoing methadone treatment for heroin addiction. Later that year Lyonne was admitted to a drug and alcohol treatment center.

Lyonne underwent open-heart surgery in 2012 to correct heart valve damage caused by her heart infection.

My life is very much in the present today. And that's what theater is all about.

[re New York] I have a real love affair with the city. I just feel like when you're up or when you're down, the city really cushions you. I feel like I just have such the blood and bones of a New Yorker that I can almost imagine better, like, giving up the fight and not being able to afford the city and going out West, keeping a small place here, and then when I'm like 80, coming back here, living on the park and going to the theater. For the matinee.

I would have done well as a gypsy child, I think. A circus baby. I coulda played a great street urchin or ragamuffin. Or just been one. I certainly liked entertaining people and making jokes, but I don't know necessarily if that's what your child is prone to that you should necessarily put them in a real working industry at six years old. By the time I was 16, I was already an exhausted cynic.

I mean, I didn't have a 28-day drug problem. I had a take-five-years-off drug problem. [Because of] "my well-publicized drug problem, there was many years I couldn't get work...I mean, life is very short but life is also very long. I don't know that there's such a rush. I think I also needed a break just in terms of the child actor in me was tired. I mean, I'd been working from, like, 6 to 24, pretty much nonstop.

[on performing her role as a cat-loving school teacher in G.B.F. (2013)'] If you're at all a reasonable human being when you're 34 years old, you don't read scripts looking at the children's parts. I don't really feel like I need to be a teenager ever again. It's really a miracle that I made it out alive. I'm doing all right being in my 30s - I think I'm hitting my sweet spot. I'm glad to have already come of age.