Madeleine Marie Stowe (born August 18, 1958) is an American actress. She appeared mostly on television before her breakthrough role in the 1987 crime-comedy film Stakeout. She went on to star in the films Revenge (1990), Unlawful Entry (1992), The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Blink (1993), Bad Girls (1994), 12 Monkeys (1995), The General’s Daughter (1999), and We Were Soldiers (2002). For her role in the 1993 independent film Short Cuts, she won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress. As of 2015, Stowe's most recent film appearance was in the 2003 thriller Octane. From 2011 to 2015, she starred as Victoria Grayson, the main antagonist of the ABC drama series Revenge. For this role, she was nominated for the 2012 Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Television Series Drama. Stowe, the first of three children, was born at the Queen of Angels Hospital, in Los Angeles, California, and raised in Eagle Rock, a suburb of Los Angeles. Her father, Robert Stowe, was a civil engineer from Oregon, while her mother, Mireya (née Mora Steinvorth), came from a prominent family in Costa Rica. One of Stowe's maternal great-great-grandfathers, politician José Joaquín Mora Porras, was a younger brother of President Juan Rafael Mora Porras, who governed Costa Rica from 1849 to 1859. Another maternal great-great-grandfather, Bruno Carranza, was briefly President of that country in 1870 (he resigned three months after taking power); his wife, Stowe's great-great-grandmother Gerónima Montealegre, was the sister of President José María Montealegre Fernández, who governed Costa Rica from 1859 to 1863. One of Stowe's maternal great-grandfathers was a German immigrant to Costa Rica. Stowe's father suffered from multiple sclerosis, and she accompanied him to his medical treatments. Stowe originally aspired to become a concert pianist, taking lessons between the ages of ten and eighteen. She later explained that playing the piano was a means to escape having to socialize with other children her age. Her Russian-born music teacher, Sergei Tarnowsky, had faith in Stowe, even teaching her from his deathbed. Following his death at the age of 92, she quit, later commenting, "I just felt it was time to not be by myself anymore."

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