A comely brunette character player, Thompson gave up a ballet career for acting. After appearing in some 20 Burger King commercials, she gained attention in "All the Right Moves" (1983) as the girlfriend of high school football player Tom Cruise. Thompson played three versions of Lorraine (Bates) McFly in "Back to the Future" (1985), rose above lackluster material in "Howard the Duck" (1986, directed by husband Howard Deutch), and demonstrated her ability to play more complex characters in "The Wizard of Loneliness" (1988). She demonstrated her dramatic range and brought grit to the role of a dying wife who selects Farrah Fawcett as her successor in the period western "The Substitute Wife" (ABC, 1994). In 1995, Thompson opted to head up the NBC sitcom "Caroline in the City", as the title character, Caroline Duffy, a cartoonist whose illustrations mirror her life.
Copyright © Baseline 2009.