Laura McKinlay Robinson (born 1957/1958) is a Canadian actress, author, game designer, singer, speaker, and television producer.

As a writer, she co-wrote or contributed stories to the Chicken Soup for the Soul series books Count Your Blessings (2009), O Canada (2011), Hooked on Hockey (2012), and Miraculous Messages from Heaven (2013).

[2][3] Her mother was Margaret Muriel Robinson, née Mars, one of triplets from Brantford, Ontario, who wrote plays for amateur theatre.

[9] Robinson graduated London South Collegiate Institute high school in 1975,[11] where she studied theatre with Marion Woodman, whom she credits with inspiring her acting career.

[5] Robinson created the board game Balderdash with advertising copywriter Paul Toyne, her boyfriend at the time, in 1984.

[15] Balderdash was one in a series of successful Canadian board games, beginning with Trivial Pursuit from Ontario in 1982, Scruples in 1984 from Manitoba, and Pictionary from Vancouver in 1985.

[22] She used this name for a 1987 role as P'Gell Roxton, the main villain in The Spirit, a television film based on the comics character that was meant to be the beginning of a series that never materialized.

[9] The series tried to capture the flavor of 1940s Hollywood film noir, and the title character was the owner of a jazz club who moonlighted as a private investigator.

Robinson credited her experience playing femmes fatale and her smoky voice with getting the role over several hundred other actresses.

[13] By 1997, she and her husband Mark Ettlinger were actively working on translating it into a television game show,[18] and 1998 they were in near-successful talks with Dan Angel and The Jim Henson Company, but these fell through.

[34] The American television game show, also called Balderdash, aired from 2004-2005 on PAX TV, hosted by Elayne Boosler.

The three successfully marketed the resulting "Count Your Blessings" jewelry on QVC cable television, but the board game took longer.

In 2009, the makers of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books agreed to publish the revised game, now called Count Your Blessings, in conjunction with the book Chicken Soup for the Soul: Count Your Blessings, which Robinson and Bryan contributed to writing.

[47][48] In 2009, Robinson and Bryan co-wrote the collection of short inspirational stories Chicken Soup for the Soul: Count Your Blessings with five author/collators, in conjunction with their board game.

[51] Her husband Mark and son Jack Ettlinger each contributed a short story to Chicken Soup for the Soul: Hooked on Hockey.