Madeleine Stowe (born August 18, 1958) is an American actress. She was born in Eagle Rock, a community next to Los Angeles, California, as the eldest of three sisters. Her father was North American and her mother had immigrated from Costa Rica when she was a young woman. Her father suffered from multiple sclerosis, which threw a shadow of sadness over her childhood.
When she was 10, Stowe began taking piano lessons with the aim to become a concert pianist, but she gave up when her instructor died some years later. She then studied cinema and journalism at Southern California University. Not too interested in her classes, Stowe volunteered doing performances at the Solaris, a Beverly Hills theater, where a movie agent saw her in a play, and got her offers for several appearances in TV films and cinema movies.
Stowe performed during nearly fifteen years mostly in minor roles as supporting actress in TV films and cinema movies. A few of her interpretations of this period became however well-known to the public, as it was the case of Stakeout, in 1987, opposite Richard Dreyfuss, and Revenge, in 1990, co-starring Kevin Costner. In 1992 Stowe finally had her big chance when she was offered a leading role in The Last of the Mohicans, together with Daniel Day-Lewis.
Thereafter, several roles in major films followed. Director Robert Altman encouraged Stowe to play a part in Short Cuts, in which she gave one of her best screen performances. She was a touching blind musician in the thriller Blink, co-starring Aidan Quinn, and a sympathetic psychiatrist in the science-fiction movie Twelve Monkeys. Stowe left in 1996 her work for a few years in order to concentrate on motherhood. In 1998 she came back and acted in The Proposition, her first film after this interruption .
Stowe is married to actor Brian Benben, with whom she acted in a TV film in 1981. The couple has a little daughter and spends all their spare time on the ranch they own in Texas.
Filmography
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