Martha Plimpton

A dramatic actress of stage, screen, and television, Martha Plimpton has specialized in playing rebellious, eccentric young women. The daughter of actress Shelley_Plimpton and actor Keith_Carradine (the two never married and split up before she was born), Plimpton was raised by her mother on New York's Upper West Side. She made her acting debut at age eight and her film debut two years later with a bit part in Rollover (1981).

When she was 11, Plimpton appeared in a series of Calvin Klein commercials, but her real break didn't come until Tom_Rickman cast her as Tommy_Lee_Jones' daughter in The_River_Rat (1984). No sooner had she finished that then she was co-starring in Steven_Spielberg's cult classic The_Goonies (1985) and the following year in Peter_Weir's The_Mosquito_Coast, which featured River_Phoenix among its impressive cast. Though her role in the latter film was relatively small, it went some way toward establishing Plimpton as a serious actress to be watched. The_Mosquito_Coast also played a vital role in her developing relationship with Phoenix; for a time the two dated seriously, and they remained close friends until the actor's death in 1993.

Plimpton subsequently appeared in numerous dramas, including Sidney_Lumet's Running on Empty (1988), in which she re-teamed with Phoenix, Woody_Allen's Another_Woman (1988), Parenthood (1989) -- in which she gave a hilarious performance as Dianne_Wiest's rebellious, pregnant teenage daughter -- and Stanley and Iris (1990), which featured her as Jane_Fonda's pregnant teenage daughter. Plimpton continued to work steadily throughout the '90s in a series of films that often featured her in eccentric roles. She did particularly memorable work in Beautiful_Girls (1996), playing Michael_Rapaport's exasperated girlfriend; I_Shot_Andy_Warhol (1996), which featured her as a lesbian prostitute; John_Waters' Pecker (1998), which cast her as the protagonist's sister, a go-go boy recruiter for the local gay bar; and 200_Cigarettes (1998), an ensemble drama in which Plimpton starred as a young woman equally obsessed with Elvis_Costello and throwing a successful New Year's Eve party.