Lea Katherine Thompson (born May 31, 1961) is an American actress, director, and television producer. She is best known for her role as Lorraine Baines in the Back to the Future trilogy and as the title character in the 1990s NBC sitcom Caroline in the City. Other films for which she is known include All the Right Moves (1983), Red Dawn (1984), Howard the Duck (1986), Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), and The Beverly Hillbillies (1993). From 2011 to 2017, she co-starred as Kathryn Kennish in the Freeform (formerly ABC Family) series Switched at Birth. Thompson was born in Rochester, Minnesota, one of five children of Clifford and Barbara Barry Thompson She has two sisters, Coleen Goodrich and Shannon Katona and two brothers, Andrew (ballet dancer) 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 American Ballet Theatre, the San Francisco Ballet, and the Pennsylvania Ballet. Told she did not have the right body to become a prima ballerina by Mikhail Baryshnikov himself, she changed her focus to acting. At the time, she was 20 years old and dancing professionally with American Ballet Theatre's Studio Company (then known as ABT II), and when the time came to decide if she would move to the main company, 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." 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. She has been married to film director Howard Deutch since 1989. They met on the set of Some Kind of Wonderful (1987). Thompson and Deutch have two daughters, Madelyn (born 1991) and Zoey (born 1994), with whom she sang on stage in the Bye Bye Birdie production for the 16th annual Alzheimer's Association "A Night at Sardi's" in March 2008.

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