Facts
Madeleine Stowe
was born in Eagle Rock,
a community next to Los Angeles, California,
the eldest of three sisters.
Her father was British,
while her mother had immigrated
from Costa Rica as 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 of becoming a concert pianist,
but she gave up some years later following
her instructor's death. She then studied cinema
and journalism at the University of Southern California.
Not overly interested in her classes, Stowe
volunteered to do performances at the Solaris,
a Beverly Hills theater, where a movie agent
saw her in a play, and subsequently
got her several offers of appearances in movies TV and films.
For nearly fifteen years Stowe
appeared mostly in minor or supporting roles
in movies and on TV. A few of her performances
from this period became, however,
well-known to the public, as was the case for Stakeout
(1987), where she played opposite Richard Dreyfuss, and Revenge,
(1990), which co-starred Kevin Costner.
In 1992 Stowe finally landed a leading role in
The Last of the Mohicans, which also starred
Daniel Day-Lewis.
Thereafter, several major film
roles followed. Director Robert Altman cast Stowe
in Short Cuts, in which she gave one
of her best screen performances as the
wife of compulsive liar Tim Robbins.
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 postponed her acting career
in '96 in order to concentrate on motherhood.
In 1998 she came back with The Proposition.
Stowe is married to actor Brian Benben,
with whom she acted in a TV film in 1981. The couple
has a little daughter and spend all their spare time on the ranch they own in Texas.
