Lea Thompson

Lea Katherine Thompson, born May 31, 1961, in Rochester, Minnesota, is an American actress, singer, dancer, and director. One of five children of Clifford and Barbara Barry Thompson, she grew up alongside two sisters, Coleen Goodrich and Shannon Katona, and two brothers, Andrew and Barry. Thompson is of Irish, English, Scots-Irish, German, and distant Dutch ancestry.

Thompson began studying ballet as a child, as did her older brother Andrew, and was performing professionally by age 14. She earned scholarships to the San Francisco Ballet, the Pennsylvania Ballet, and the American Ballet Theatre. By age 20 she was dancing with American Ballet Theatre's Studio Company, then known as ABT II. It was during this period that artistic director Mikhail Baryshnikov told her she was too stocky to continue in the company, a moment Thompson later described as the turning point that led her to leave professional ballet and redirect her focus toward acting. Her brother Andrew, by contrast, continued in ballet and built a long career in the field.

After relocating to New York at age 20, Thompson began pursuing acting. Her earliest screen work included Burger King advertisements alongside Sarah Michelle Gellar and Elisabeth Shue, and a role in the interactive live-action video game MysteryDisc: Murder, Anyone? in 1982. Her film debut came in 1983 with Jaws 3-D, followed that same year by All the Right Moves. She continued building her film résumé with Red Dawn and The Wild Life in 1984.

Thompson's most widely recognized screen role came in 1985 when she was cast as Lorraine Baines McFly in Back to the Future, playing the mother of Marty McFly who, as a 1950s teenager, becomes romantically interested in her own future son after he travels back in time. The role carried through two sequels, completing the trilogy in 1990. Also in 1986, Thompson starred in Howard the Duck as Beverly Switzler, a musician and lead vocalist for a band called Cherry Bomb, for which she recorded songs that appeared on the film's soundtrack album and on singles. Her other notable film credits from the late 1980s include SpaceCamp (1986), Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), Casual Sex?, and The Wizard of Loneliness. She also appeared in the 1989 television film Nightbreaker, earning a CableACE Award nomination for her performance.

In the early 1990s, Thompson took on several prominent film roles, including Alice Mitchell, the mother of the title character in Dennis the Menace (1993), the villainess Laura Jackson in The Beverly Hillbillies (1993), and a ballet instructor in The Little Rascals (1994). She also appeared in television films including The Substitute Wife (1994) and The Right to Remain Silent (1996).

Thompson found sustained television success beginning in 1995 as the star of the NBC sitcom Caroline in the City, in which she played the title character Caroline Duffy. The series ran until 1999. In 1996, she received a People's Choice Award for Favorite Female Performer in a New TV Series, and the show itself won for Favorite New TV Comedy Series at the 22nd People's Choice Awards. Also in 1998, Thompson appeared in A Will of Their Own, an NBC television miniseries directed by Karen Arthur that followed six generations of women within one family and their pursuit of power and independence in America. The miniseries debuted on October 18, 1998.

That same year, 1998, Thompson made her Broadway debut, appearing in Cabaret. Following her Broadway work, she continued in television and film, including the Hallmark Channel series Jane Doe beginning in 2005, in which she played Cathy Davis, a former secret agent turned housewife who assists the government in solving mysteries. Thompson also directed two installments of that series: Jane Doe: The Harder They Fall and Jane Doe: Eye of the Beholder.

From 2011 to 2017, Thompson co-starred as Kathryn Kennish in the ABC Family series Switched at Birth, centered on a family who discovers their teenage daughter was switched with another baby at the hospital. In 2014, she competed on the 19th season of Dancing with the Stars, paired with professional dancer Artem Chigvintsev; the pair were eliminated in the quarterfinals, finishing in sixth place. That year she also appeared in the film Left Behind, playing Irene Steele.

In 2017, Thompson was cast as Margaret "Marmee" March in Little Women, the seventh film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's novel, written and directed by Clare Niederpruem. The film was released on September 28, 2018. Thompson also expanded her work as a director, helming episodes of the Syfy series Resident Alien in 2022 and 2024, and directing episodes 3 and 4 of season 2 of the Paramount+ series Star Trek: Picard in 2022, in which she also appeared as Dr. Diane Werner in episode 5. She subsequently starred alongside Stacey Farber in The Spencer Sisters, a Canadian police procedural and comedy-drama series on CTV that began in February 2023 and was canceled in 2024.