Madeleine Stowe

Born: 18 August 1958
Where: Eagle Rock, California

The former aspiring concert pianist landed her big break opposite Daniel Day-Lewis as a sparky frontierswoman in 1992's The Last of the Mohicans.

She has referred to her childhood as troubled, partly because her father suffered from multiple sclerosis.

Stowe, the oldest of three, found an outlet for her frustrations in the piano and from age 10, she trained with noted teacher Sergei Tarnowsky.

At his death in 1976, however, she abandoned music and enrolled at the University of Southern California as a journalism and film graduate.

Bored, she frequently cut classes to volunteer at a Beverly Hills theater where she was spotted by Richard Dreyfuss' agent.

Early TV work included the series Baretta and the TV movie The Deerslayer.

Although she landed her first film role in 1986 in Tropical Snow, the feature was not released for three years.

By then, Stowe had already begun to make inroads on Hollywood, partly on the strength of her turn as a woman pursued by a killer (Aidan Quinn) in Stakeout.

She starred alongside Kevin Costner and Anthony Quinn in the uneven Revenge and offered a strong turn as a political prisoner verbally sparring with Alan Rickman in Closet Land.

Stowe's profile in Hollywood increased with her performances as the menaced wife in Unlawful Entry and particularly as a British woman who falls for a woodsman in The Last of the Mohicans.

Robert Altman tapped the actress to play Tim Robbins' long-suffering wife and elicited one of her best and most complex screen portraits in Short Cuts.

Stowe graduated to full-fledged status as leading lady with the otherwise routine thriller Blink.

She was virtually wasted as one of four prostitutes in the feminist Western Bad Girls but rebounded with a nice turn as a sympathetic psychiatrist in the sci-fi thriller 12 Monkeys.

After several years off screen to concentrate on motherhood, Stowe returned as a wealthy Bostonian seeking a surrogate father for her child in The Proposition.

In 1999, she starred in the General's Daughter and followed this up with the sci-fi thriller The Imposter.

She played an army widow in the Mel Gibson war drama We Were Soldiers and played a mother whose daughter is kidnapped by a blood cult in the routine Octane.