Lisa Pelikan

Lisa Pelikan is an American actress working in stage, film, and television, born on July 12, 1954, in Berkeley, California. Her father, Robert G. Pelikan, was an international economist who served as minister-counselor for the United States at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris, and her mother, Helen L. Pelikan, was a psychologist. Pelikan is of Czech descent. Because of her father's career, she spent her childhood living in France, Japan, and Italy before her family settled in Bethesda, Maryland, when she was a teenager. At age six, she was diagnosed with a bone tumor in her leg and underwent surgery. The tumor recurred during high school, requiring a second surgery that left her unable to walk throughout her entire senior year, ending an earlier interest in ballet she had developed while attending school in Maryland.

Pelikan redirected her focus to acting and enrolled at the Juilliard School in New York City on a full scholarship to its drama division. Her first regular television work came in 1975, when she played maid Kate Mahaffey on the CBS soap opera Beacon Hill. She made her Broadway debut in 1977, playing Rosaline in a production of Romeo and Juliet. That same year, she made her feature film debut in the drama Julia, portraying the younger version of Vanessa Redgrave's title character.

Her subsequent film work included the title role in the horror film Jennifer (1978), in which she starred opposite Nina Foch and John Gavin. In 1979, she appeared as Lucy Scanlon in the television miniseries Studs Lonigan, alongside Harry Hamlin, Colleen Dewhurst, and Brad Dourif. In 1984, she had a supporting role in Jonathan Demme's Swing Shift, which starred Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. Pelikan appeared in a leading role in the horror film Ghoulies in 1985 and starred as widowed mother Sarah Hargrave in Return to the Blue Lagoon in 1991. She had a minor part in the thriller Shadow of Doubt in 1998.

On stage, Pelikan won a Drama-Logue Award for her performance in Only a Broken String of Pearls, a 1995 Los Angeles production of a one-woman play about Zelda Fitzgerald written by Willard Simms. Pelikan was married to actor Robert Harper from 1981 to 1984. She married actor Bruce Davison in 1986; the couple had one son, Ethan, born in 1996, and divorced in 2006 after twenty years of marriage. In 2018, Pelikan earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in acting from California State University, Long Beach. As of 2022, she taught Acting with the Camera at HB Studio in New York City. In August 2025, she married Russian internet personality and streamer Ilya Davydov, known professionally as Maddyson, in a private ceremony first reported by the Moscow Star Tribune.