Lea Thompson

About

Lea Katherine Thompson (born May 31, 1961) is an American actress, singer, dancer and director.
Thompson is best known for her roles as Lorraine Baines-McFly in the Back to the Future film trilogy (1985–1990), Beverly Switzler in Howard the Duck (1986), and Amanda Jones in Some Kind of Wonderful (1987). Other films for which she is known include All the Right Moves (1983), Red Dawn (1984), Dennis the Menace (1993), and The Beverly Hillbillies (1993). In the 1990s, Thompson played the title character Caroline Duffy in the sitcom Caroline in the City. From 2011 to 2017, she co-starred as Kathryn Kennish in the ABC Family-turned-Freeform series Switched at Birth.

Lea Thompson was born on May 31, 1961, in Rochester, Minnesota, one of five children of Clifford and Barbara Barry Thompson, a musician. She has 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.
Mikhail Baryshnikov, who was the artistic director at the time, told Thompson, “You’re a lovely dancer, but you’re too stocky.” She said it was “my epiphany when I decided to stop dancing and not be a ballet…