Caroline Kava

Caroline Kava is an American actress and playwright born on September 25, 1949. Her career spans stage, film, and television, with work extending from Broadway productions in the 1970s to film roles in the 1980s and 1990s.

Kava's Broadway career ran from 1973 to 1978 and included appearances in Stages, The Merchant of Venice, and The Plough and the Stars. Among her Broadway credits, she played Polly in Threepenny Opera in 1976, a production mounted by Joe Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center.

Her film work includes a role as a prostitute in the 1980 film Heaven's Gate. In the 1985 film Year of the Dragon, she portrayed the wife of the character played by Mickey Rourke, and in Little Nikita (1988) she played the mother of the title character, portrayed by River Phoenix. Her role as the mother of Ron Kovic, the character played by Tom Cruise, came in Born on the Fourth of July (1989). Kava also appeared alongside Alan Arkin in the 1997 film Four Days in September.

Her television work includes the films Act of Vengeance (1986) and Guilty Until Proven Innocent (1991). On the stage, Kava wrote the 1986 Off-Broadway play The Early Girl and in 2009 adapted Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler for the Mauckingbird Theatre Company in Philadelphia.