Lisa Banes

Lisa Lou Banes (July 9, 1955 – June 14, 2021) was an American actress whose career encompassed more than 80 film and television roles alongside a sustained presence on the Broadway and regional stage. Born in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, to Ken Banes, an advertiser, and Mary Lou (Shalenhamer) Banes, a model, she was raised in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where she attended Cheyenne Mountain High School. She began acting professionally at fifteen and went on to train at the Juilliard School in New York City during the 1970s.

Banes established herself quickly in New York theater. In 1980, she took on the role of Alison Porter in the Roundabout Theatre's production of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, earning a Theatre World Award for that performance. The following year she appeared at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, in James M. Barrie's The Admirable Crichton, playing Lady Mary, a role that drew praise from New York Times critic Mel Gussow for the "panache" she brought to the character. She subsequently appeared in Wendy Kesselman's My Sister in This House and Chekhov's Three Sisters, and in 1984 received a Drama Desk Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her work in Wendy Wasserstein's Isn't It Romantic.

Her Broadway career spanned more than two decades, beginning in 1988 when she originated the role of Cassie in Neil Simon's comedy Rumors. In 1995, she played Lady Croom in the American premiere of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. The musical High Society brought her back to Broadway in 1998, followed by the play Accent on Youth in 2009 and a 2010 revival of Noël Coward's Present Laughter. Beyond Broadway, Banes continued to work in regional theater, including the 2018 world premiere of Eleanor Burgess's The Niceties at the Huntington Theater in Boston, a production she reprised the following year at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles.

Her film career began with the role of Mrs. Berry in The Hotel New Hampshire in 1984. She appeared as Tom Cruise's girlfriend Bonnie in Cocktail in 1988, and later took roles in Dragonfly and Pumpkin, both in 2002. Her most widely recognized film performance came in David Fincher's 2014 thriller Gone Girl, in which she played Marybeth Elliott, the mother of Amy Elliott. She also appeared in A Cure for Wellness in 2016.

On television, Banes held recurring and regular roles across multiple series. She played Doreen Morrison in The Trials of Rosie O'Neill, Ellen Collins in Royal Pains, and Mayor Anita Massengil in the Fox comedy Son of the Beach from 2000 to 2001. Additional recurring roles included Georgia Boone on The King of Queens, Victoria on Six Feet Under, Eve McBain on One Life to Live, and the Ranch Director in the sixth season of Nashville. She appeared as Anne Kane in the 1985 miniseries Kane & Abel and guest starred as a Trill doctor in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Equilibrium." Her final screen credits were episodes of The Orville and Them.

Banes married journalist Kathryn Kranhold, a reporter for the Center for Public Integrity, in 2017. The couple lived in Los Angeles. On June 4, 2021, while visiting New York, Banes was struck by a person riding an electric scooter through a red light as she crossed Amsterdam Avenue in a marked crosswalk near the Juilliard School. The rider fled the scene. Banes was hospitalized at Mount Sinai Morningside Hospital with a traumatic brain injury and died there on June 14, 2021, at the age of 65. Police arrested 26-year-old Brian Boyd on August 5, 2021, near the location of the incident. Boyd pleaded guilty to manslaughter on September 28, 2022, and on November 30, 2022, was sentenced to up to three years in prison.