Madeleine Stowe

Madeleine Stowe is an American actress of British and Costa Rican descent.

As a child, she trained as a concert pianist, but eventually quit to study film and journalism at the University of Southern California.

She worked for over a decade playing small parts in film and TV until her breakout role in the 1987 film, Stakeout made her a star. She went on to appear in the films The Two Jakes, Short Cuts, Twelve Monkeys, and We Were Soldiers, but is best known for her lead role in The Last of the Mohicans.

1. On the link between movies and school violence: "A lot of people in the movie industry tend to run and hide from it like ostriches. Movie industry people are definitely in denial right now, but you do become desensitized to violence when you see it on the screen so often. Let's face it, violence exists for one reason in movies, and that's to get an effect, create an emotion, sell tickets."

• Note: The majority of the links in this timeline are to IMDb, which has pop-ups.

• August 18, 1958: Born

• 1981: Gangster Wars

• 1987: Stakeout

• 1992: The Last of the Mohicans

• 1993: Another Stakeout

• 1995: Twelve Monkeys

• 1999: The General's Daughter

• 2002: We Were Soldiers

• 2006: Raines