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A tall, exotic brunette beauty, Madeleine Stowe spent the better part of a decade and a half in sometime thankless supporting roles before finally making her mark as the frontierswoman who falls for Daniel Day-Lewis in "The Last of the Mohicans" (1992). The native California has referred to her childhood as troubled, partly because her father suffered the debilitating effects of multiple sclerosis. Stowe, the oldest of three, found an outlet for her frustrations in the piano and from age 10, she trained with noted teacher Sergei Tarnowsky. At his death in 1976, however, she abandoned music and enrolled at USC as a journalism and film major. Bored, she frequently cut classes to volunteer at a Beverly Hills theater where she was spotted by Richard Dreyfuss' agent. In order to gain employment, she fabricated a resume complete with play titles, landing her first professional assignment on an episode of the ABC series "Baretta".

Other work soon followed, including the TV movie "The Deerslayer" (NBC. 1978), based on a James Fenimore Cooper novel, and the perennial Christmas telefilm "The Nativity" (ABC, 1978), in which she was Mary to John Shea's Joseph. Although she landed her first film role in 1986 in "Tropical Snow", the feature was not released for three years. By then, Stowe had already begun to make inroads on Hollywood, partly on the strength of her turn as a woman pursued by a killer (Aidan Quinn) in "Stakeout" (1987). She held her own against powerhouses Kevin Costner and Anthony Quinn as the female leg of a romantic triangle in the uneven "Revenge" (1990) and offered a strong turn as a political prisoner verbally sparring with Alan Rickman in "Closet Land" (1991). Stowe's profile in Hollywood increased with her performances as the menaced wife in "Unlawful Entry" (1992) and particularly as a British woman who falls for a woodsman in "The Last of the Mohicans". Robert Altman tapped the actress to play Tim Robbins' long-suffering wife and elicited one of her best and most complex screen portraits in "Short Cuts" (1993). Stowe graduated to full-fledged status as leading lady with the otherwise routine thriller "Blink" (1994), cast as a blind woman who witnesses a murder and falls for the cop on the case, played by Aidan Quinn. Although she tried gamely, she was virtually wasted as one of four prostitutes in the feminist Western "Bad Girls" (1994) but rebounded with a nice turn as a sympathetic psychiatrist in the sci-fi thriller "12 Monkeys" (1995). After several years off screen to concentrate on motherhood, Stowe returned as a wealthy Bostonian seeking a surrogate father for her child in the ludicrous "The Proposition" (1998).