Lea Katherine Thompson

Thompson was born on May 31, 1961 in Rochester, Minnesota,[ one of five children born to Clifford Thompson and Barbara Barry Thompson, a musician. Thompson is the younger sister of Coleen Goodrich, Shannon Katona and Barry Katona. Her mother is of Irish descent.She trained in ballet as a young girl, and was dancing professionally by the age of 14, winning scholarship opportunities to the San Francisco Ballet, the Pennsylvania Ballet, and the American Ballet Theatre.When she turned 20 years old aged and performing professionally with American Ballet Theatre's Studio Company (then known as ABT II), the time came to decide if she wanted to move to the main company. Mikhail Baryshnikov (the director of the artistic department at the time) told her that she was a fantastic dancer but too stocky. According to her, it was "my epiphany ," when I decided to give up dancing and to be a ballet dancer. It was a truly memorable event. If it wasn't for that, I'd been hitting my head on a wall for another 10plus years. "She changed her focus on acting.Moving to New York at age 20 she appeared in a variety of Burger King advertisements in the 1980s along with Sarah Michelle Gellar and Elisabeth Shue as her final co-stars in Back to the Future Part II and Back to the Future Part III.CareerThompson has made her home media screen debut in 1982 as Cecily "Sissy" Loper in the live-action, interactive video game MysteryDisc: Murder, Anyone? and also her debut film in 1983 with Jaws in 3-D. She recalls the film as "the very first movie I've ever watched, but I made up my mind and claimed I'd done a couple of other movies and when I turned up, I really knew practically nothing. I also claimed that I was able to waterski. I wasn't. Because I was required by law to take part in the Sea World water-skiing program, I was given five days in which to master the basics of water skiing. I don't even know how to swim!" She followed that with All the Right Moves (1983), Red Dawn (1984) and The Wild Life (1984).