Lea Katherine Thompson

Thompson was born in Rochester, Minnesota on May 31st, 1961. She is the fifth child of Clifford Barry Thompson and Barbara Barry Thompson. [ 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 young girl, and was dancing professionally at the age of 14, securing scholarship opportunities to San Francisco Ballet, the Pennsylvania Ballet, and the American Ballet Theatre.When she was 20 years older and was dancing professionally with the American Ballet Theatre's Studio Company (then known as ABT II), the moment came to determine if she should join the company's main stage. Mikhail baryshnikov was then at the time the artistic director. He said to her "You are a beautiful dancer but your body is bulky." It was her "epiphany" that she said it was the turning point which made me decide to quit dancing and stop being the ballet dancer. This was an extremely special moment. If it wasn't for that, I'd been banging my head against the wall for 10or more years. "The actress changed her focus towards acting. When she was 20, she moved to New York with Sarah Michelle Gellar, Elisabeth Shue and a few others from Burger King ads. In 1982, CareerThompson appeared in Cecily "Sissy" which was Live-action interactive video game called MysteryDisc: Murder! Anyone? and her movie debut in 1983, with Jaws 3-D. The film was described by her as "the first movie I've ever seen, however I made up my mind and claimed I'd done a couple of other movies and when I turned up, I was really absolutely nothing. I also claimed that I was able to waterski. But I wasn't. Because I was required to be a part of the Sea World water-skiing program, I had just five days to study the fundamentals of water-skiing. I'm not even sure how to swim!" The singer followed this up with All the Right Moves (1983), Red Dawn (1984), and The Wild Life (1984).