Martha Plimpton

Martha Plimpton is an American actress born on November 16, 1970, in New York City. The daughter of actors Keith Carradine and Shelley Plimpton, who met during the original Broadway run of Hair, she is a member of the Carradine family, with actor John Carradine as her paternal grandfather. She attended the Professional Children's School in Manhattan. Plimpton is an eighth cousin twice removed of writer and editor George Plimpton, their shared common ancestor being Captain John Plimpton (1620–1678).

Plimpton began her professional life as a model, appearing in an early 1980s Calvin Klein campaign before transitioning to film. Her feature debut came with a small role in the 1981 political thriller Rollover, followed by a part in the 1984 drama The River Rat opposite Tommy Lee Jones. Her breakthrough arrived with the 1985 adventure film The Goonies, in which she played Stef Steinbrenner. She subsequently appeared in The Mosquito Coast (1986), the critically praised Shy People (1987), and Running on Empty (1988), an Oscar-nominated film in which she starred opposite River Phoenix. Her role in Running on Empty earned her a Young Artist Award nomination. She also appeared in Woody Allen's Another Woman (1988) and the commercially successful Parenthood (1989), in which she played the teenage daughter of Dianne Wiest's character. Parenthood grossed over $126 million and received two Oscar nominations.

During her late teenage years, Plimpton also performed in regional theater in Seattle, Washington. She starred as a cancer patient in the German film Zwei Frauen (1990), shaving her head for the role; the film received a German Film Award nomination for Best Fiction Film. Her subsequent screen work included the romantic drama Stanley & Iris (1990), the television movie A Woman at War (1991), in which she played the lead role of Helene Moszkiewiez, and the film Samantha (1991). She appeared in I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) as a close friend of radical feminist Valerie Solanas, and in Beautiful Girls (1996). She took the lead role of M.J. Preston in the Showtime television films The Defenders: Payback (1997), The Defenders: Choice of Evils (1998), and The Defenders: Taking the First (1998), a retooling of the classic television series. She appeared in John Waters's Pecker (1998) and the film 200 Cigarettes (1999), and held a recurring role in the sixth season of the NBC medical drama ER as Meg Corwyn in 1999.

Plimpton became involved with the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, appearing in Hedda Gabler in 2001 among other productions. In 2002, she received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for a guest appearance as a drug addict on the NBC police drama Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. She starred in The Sleepy Time Gal (2001) and appeared in the documentary Searching for Debra Winger (2002). She had a recurring role in the NBC series Surface (2005–2006) and guest-starred in an episode of 7th Heaven in 2004, also writing the episode entitled "Red Socks," which aired in 2005.

Plimpton made her Broadway debut in the play Sixteen Wounded in 2004. From October 2006 to May 2007, she appeared in all three parts of Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia at Lincoln Center, including Part 1 (Voyage) and Part 2 (Shipwreck), as well as in Shining City during the same period. Her work in The Coast of Utopia earned her a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play in 2007 and a Tony Award nomination for Featured Actress in a Play. She received a second Tony Award nomination in 2008 for her performance in Caryl Churchill's Top Girls at the Biltmore Theater, and a third Tony nomination followed for her role as Gladys Bumps in the Roundabout Theatre Company's production of Pal Joey (2008–2009). In August and September 2007, she appeared as Helena in the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. She also appeared in Cymbeline on Broadway in 2007, and returned to Broadway in A Delicate Balance in 2014.

On television, Plimpton took a recurring guest role on the legal drama The Good Wife from 2009 to 2013, a performance for which she received a Primetime Emmy Award. She starred as Virginia Chance in the Fox sitcom Raising Hope from 2010 to 2014, a role that earned her an additional Emmy nomination. She later starred in the ABC sitcom The Real O'Neals from 2016 to 2017. Her film work continued with Small Town Murder Songs (2011), the animated feature Frozen 2 (2019), and Mass (2021). Plimpton co-founded a production company called Everything is Horrible, which has produced short films for the Internet.