Actress Laurie Metcalf — possibly the hardest-working mom in showbiz with three Emmys, a Tony, and now Oscar Buzz for her latest role in Lady Bird — tells Closer Weekly she has never lost her passion for acting but it’s her four kids that keep her going.

“I’ve been truly fortunate to bounce around between theater, film, and TV, so each time I mix it up, it’s refreshing,” she tells Closer.

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Now she’s being touted as an Oscar frontrunner for her tour de force as a mother facing an empty nest in Lady Bird. It’s a role that landed painfully close to home.

“I could identify with it immediately because I was going through the same thing at the time with a 16-year-old,” she tells Closer of son Donovan (with ex-husband Matt Roth). “It hit me like a train — the butting of heads and lashing out and all the miscommunication.”

Laurie has two older kids (Zoe, 33, and Will, 23), but “their teenage years were pretty smooth,” she tells the magazine.

Zoe has followed in her mom’s footsteps as the younger version of Laurie’s character — Jim Parsons’ mother — on The Big Bang Theory in the hit prequel Young Sheldon. “I didn’t want her to go into acting when she was a child, although she did play young Jackie a few times on Roseanne — I was worried about the stress,” Laurie admits. “It wasn’t until she went to college that she fell in love with it.”

Returning to her role as Jackie in Roseanne three decades later, “It’s shocking that it feels like no time has passed at all,” she tells Closer. “We really became a family, and I guess that never left our bodies.”

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