Trini Alvarado

Trini Alvarado, born Trinidad Alvarado on January 10, 1967, in New York City, is an American actress whose career has spanned stage, film, and television. Her father, Domingo Alvarado, was a Spanish-born flamenco singer, and her mother, Sylvia, was a Puerto Rican flamenco dancer. Alvarado grew up on upper Riverside Drive in Manhattan and attended the Professional Children's School before studying at Fordham University. She is married to actor Robert McNeill and continues to reside in New York City.

Alvarado entered show business at age seven as a member of her family's dance troupe, which led directly to her stage work. In 1978, she appeared on Broadway in Elizabeth Swados's musical The Runaways, playing the role of Melinda. Within that production, she was featured alongside Karen Evans on the song "Lullaby From Baby to Baby," which Swados designated the musical's theme song. Around the same period, she appeared in two Unicorn Tales television specials during the 1977–78 season.

Her screen career began in earnest with the 1979 film Rich Kids, in which she starred opposite John Lithgow and Jeremy Levy and contributed vocals to the closing song "Happy Ida and Broken-Hearted John." That same year she appeared in the ABC Afterschool Special A Movie Star's Daughter as Dena McKain, the first of two appearances in that series, the second being the 1981 special Starstruck. In 1980, she appeared in Times Square alongside Tim Curry and Robin Johnson, performing the song "Your Daughter Is One" with Johnson.

Alvarado continued building her screen résumé through the early 1980s, appearing in Gillian Armstrong's 1984 drama Mrs. Soffel. Her stage work continued as well: in 1985 she played Anne Frank in the off-Broadway musical Yours, Anne, and the following year she took the title role in another off-Broadway production, Maggie Magalita. Film roles in the late 1980s included the 1987 feature The Chair and the teen film Satisfaction, before she was cast as the daughter of Bette Midler's character in Stella. Midler and Alvarado performed an impromptu duet of the Beatles' "If I Fell" during Alvarado's screen test, an exchange that contributed to her being cast in the role. She subsequently appeared in American Friends, written by and starring Michael Palin, playing the role of Elinor Hartley, and in the 1992 biopic The Babe alongside John Goodman, portraying Helen Woodford Ruth.

Alvarado is perhaps most widely recognized for her role as Margaret "Meg" March in the 1994 film adaptation of Little Women, again directed by Gillian Armstrong. In preparation for the film, she and her castmates underwent instruction in Victorian etiquette and wore period-accurate restrictive clothing. The following year she appeared in The Perez Family alongside Alfred Molina, Anjelica Huston, and Marisa Tomei. In 1996, she starred as Lucy Lynskey in Peter Jackson's horror-comedy The Frighteners, a role that required her to perform physically demanding scenes and involved a lengthy location shoot in New Zealand lasting nearly seven months. That same year she also appeared in The Christmas Tree, the directorial debut of Sally Field.

Later credits include a supporting role in the 2006 film Little Children, appearances in All Good Things and The Good Guy — the latter screened at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 26, 2009 — and a brief appearance in Paulie in 1998. On television, she appeared opposite Eric Stoltz in the 2000 production The Last Dance and played Samantha Loeb in two episodes of the science-fiction drama Fringe in 2008 and 2009. In May 2014, she appeared in the episode "Forget Me" of the series Black Box. Beyond her on-screen work, Alvarado has provided voice-over narration for several audio books, including Tamora Pierce's Trickster's Choice, Trickster's Queen, and the Alanna: Song of the Lioness Quartet series, as well as Debbie Macomber's Changing Habits.