Lea Thompson

Lea Thompson is an actress and director best known for her role as Lorraine Baines in the Back to the Future trilogy and as the star of the sitcom Caroline in the City. Thompson trained as a ballet dancer from a young age and began dancing professionally with the American Ballet Theatre at age 20. She later shifted her focus to acting after deciding to leave ballet in her late teens and relocated to New York City to pursue a career in entertainment.

Thompson began her career in commercials before landing her debut film role in Jaws 3-D (1983). Her breakthrough came with All the Right Moves (1983) opposite Tom Cruise, followed by high-profile roles in Red Dawn (1984) and The Wild Life (1984). The following year, she was cast as Lorraine Baines in Back to the Future (1985), a role she reprised in both sequels.

She later starred in Howard the Duck (1986), Some Kind of Wonderful (1987) and led the NBC series Caroline in the City, which aired from 1995 to 1999. She went on to appear on all five seasons of Freeform’s Switched at Birth from 2011 to 2017, making her directorial debut on an episode of the show. In 2024, she played the role of Nancy Hillier on the drama The Chicken Sisters.

She also competed on Dancing with the Stars in 2014 and was eliminated in quarterfinals with partner Artem Chigvintsev. Thompson married director Howard Deutch in 1989 after meeting on the set of Some Kind of Wonderful. They share daughters Madelyn Deutch (born in 1991) and Zoey Deutch (born in 1994), both of whom are actresses. Lea directed her daughters in the 2017 film The Year of Spectacular Men, which was written by Madelyn.