Up for auction "Back to the Future" Lea Thompson Hand Signed 8X10 B&W Photo.  

ES-2963C

Lea

Katherine Thompson (born

May 31, 1961) is an American actress, director and producer. She

is best known for her role as Lorraine Baines-McFly in the Back to the Future film

trilogy (1985-1990) and Beverly Switzler in Howard the Duck (1986).

Other films for which she is known include All the Right Moves (1983), Red Dawn (1984), Some Kind of Wonderful (1987)

and The Beverly Hillbillies (1993).

In the 1990s, she played the title character in the NBC 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.

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. Her mother is of Irish

descent.

She studied ballet as a girl and danced

professionally by the age of 14, winning scholarships to the San Francisco Ballet,

the Pennsylvania Ballet, and

the American Ballet Theatre. When

she was 20 years old and dancing professionally with American Ballet Theatre's

Studio Company (then known as ABT II), the time came to decide if she would

move to the main company[ Mikhail 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 dancer. It was a wonderful moment

because I could've been banging my head against the wall for another 10

years." She changed her focus to acting. Moving

to New York at age 20, she performed in a number of Burger King advertisements in the 1980s along with Sarah Michelle Gellar and Elisabeth Shue, her eventual co-star in Back to the Future Part II and Back to the Future Part

III. Thompson made her home-media screen debut in 1982 as Cecily

"Sissy" Loper in the interactive live-action video game MysteryDisc:

Murder, Anyone? and her movie debut in 1983, with Jaws 3-D. She recalled the film as "the very first

movie I ever got, but I lied and said I had done a couple of other movies, so

when I showed up, I really knew absolutely nothing. Also, I had said that I

knew how to water ski. And I did not. So I had, like, five days to learn

really, really complicated water-skiing things, because I had to fit into

the Sea World water-skiing

show. I don’t even know how to swim!" She followed this with All the Right Moves (1983), Red Dawn (1984), and The Wild Life (1984).

Thompson's most famous role is that of Lorraine Baines McFly in

the Back to the Future trilogy, with the first film released

in 1985. Thompson's character is the mother of Marty McFly, played by Michael J. Fox, whom Marty meets when she is a 1950s

adolescent age after he travels back in time; he has to avoid having Lorraine

fall in love with him instead of with his future father, George (Crispin Glover), which leads to awkward scenes where Lorraine

is attracted to him. In 1986, Thompson starred in SpaceCamp and Howard the Duck. For

the latter film, she sang several songs on the soundtrack in character, as

musician Beverly Switzler, who was

the lead vocalist for a band called Cherry Bomb. The recordings appeared on the

soundtrack album and on singles. Rounding out film appearances in the late

1980s, Thompson starred in Some Kind of Wonderful, Casual Sex?, and The Wizard of Loneliness.

She also had a prominent role in the 1989 TV film Nightbreaker, for

which she was nominated for a CableACE Award. In the early 1990s, Thompson starred as the

mother of the eponymous character in Dennis the Menace (1993),

the villainess in The Beverly Hillbillies (1993),

and a snooty ballet instructor in The Little Rascals (1994).

She also appeared in several TV films throughout the 1990s, including The

Substitute Wife (1994) and The Right To Remain Silent (1996).

Thompson found moderate critical and popular success as the star of the NBC sitcom Caroline in the City from

1995 to 1999. In 1996, Thompson received a People's Choice Award for

Favorite Female Performer in a New TV Series, while her show won for Favorite

New TV Comedy Series. Thompson also starred in A Will of their Own, a

1998 American television mini-series directed by Karen Arthur. The film follows

six generations of females within one family, and their struggle for power and

independence in America. The film debuted on October 18, 1998, on the NBC

network to strong critical reviews.