Sedgwick starred in the television series The Closer from 2005 to 2012.
She dubbed the voice of Batwoman in the animated movie Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman. She also starred alongside her husband Kevin Bacon in two films: the 1991 sex comedy Pyrates, and the 2004 drama The Woodsman. She played the parts of Mae Coleman in 2003's Secondhand Lions and Stella Peck in the 2007 film The Game Plan. She starred in the Emmy Award–winning 1992 made-for-TV film Miss Rose White as a Jewish immigrant who comes to terms with her ethnicity. During the 1990s, she appeared in several Hollywood movies, including Singles (1992), Heart and Souls (1993), Something to Talk About (1995), and Phenomenon, in which she played the love interest of John Travolta's character.
In 1988, she appeared in a TV version of Lanford Wilson's Lemon Sky. Sedgwick made her debut at the age of 16 on the television soap opera Another World as Julia Shearer, troubled granddaughter of Liz Matthews.
Sedgwick graduated from Friends Seminary and attended Sarah Lawrence College before transferring to the University of Southern California, where she graduated with a theater degree. Sedgwick's parents separated when she was four and divorced when she was six her mother subsequently married Ben Heller, an art dealer. She is the aunt of R&B/pop singer George Nozuka and his younger singer-songwriter brother Justin Nozuka (their mother, Holly, is Sedgwick's half-sister). Sedgwick is also a sister of actor Robert Sedgwick, half-sister of jazz guitarist Mike Stern, the first cousin once removed of actress Edie Sedgwick, and a niece of the writer John Sedgwick. Ī member of the Sedgwick family on her father's side, she is a descendant of Major General Robert Sedgwick, Judge Theodore Sedgwick, Endicott Peabody (the founder of the Groton School), William Ellery (a signer of the Declaration of Independence), Samuel Appleton, John Lathrop, of Boston, Massachusetts, and is the great-granddaughter of Henry Dwight Sedgwick III, thus the corresponding niece to his brother Ellery Sedgwick, owner/editor (1908-1938) of The Atlantic Monthly. Sedgwick has identified herself as Jewish and has stated that she participates in Passover seders. Her mother was Jewish and her father was Episcopalian and of English heritage. Sedgwick was born in New York City, the daughter of Patricia (née Rosenwald), a speech teacher and educational/family therapist and Henry Dwight Sedgwick V, a venture capitalist.