Lea Thompson

Lea Katherine Thompson (born May 31, 1961) is an American actress, television director, and television producer. She is known for her role as Lorraine Baines in the Back to the Future trilogy and as the title character in the 1990s NBC sitcom Caroline in the City. Other films for which she is known include All the Right Moves (1983), Red Dawn (1984), Howard the Duck (1986) Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), and The Beverly Hillbillies (1993). From 2011-2017, she co-starred as Kathryn Kennish in the Freeform (formerly ABC Family) series Switched at Birth. 2Life and career 3Early life Thompson was born in Rochester, Minnesota, one of five children of Clifford and Barbara Barry Thompson. She has two sisters, Coleen Goodrich and Shannon Katona and two brothers, Andrew (Ballet dancer) and Barry. Her mother is of Irish descent. She studied ballet as a girl and danced professionally by the age of 14, winning scholarships to the American Ballet Theatre, the San Francisco Ballet, and the Pennsylvania Ballet. Told she did not have the right body to become a prima ballerina by Mikhail Baryshnikov himself, she changed her focus to acting. At the time, she was 20 years old and dancing professionally with American Ballet Theatre's Studio Company (then known as ABT II) and when it came time to decide if she would move to the main company, Baryshnikov who was the Artistic Director at the time told her "You're a lovely dancer, but you're too stocky." In her words, that was "my epiphany when I decided to stop dancing and not be a ballet dance