Madeleine Stowe

Biography

This sexy, long-haired brunette has often been cast as window dressing in big-budget male films, but has never been less than interesting, and has sometimes stolen thunder from her co-stars. You can see her nude here.

An aspiring concert pianist, Madeleine Stowe was spotted by an agent at USC's theater department and the non-actress fast-talked her way into a small screen career. Stowe filmed the low-budget actioner "Tropical Snow" in 1986, but it went unreleased until 1989. So her nominal feature debut was as the object of surveillance in "Stakeout" (1987), co-starring Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez.

She was the lust object of Mark Harmon in "Worth Winning" (1989) and, similarly, Kevin Costner in "Revenge" (1990) in which she gets naked quite a lot. After playing a murder victim's wife in "The Two Jakes" (1990), Stowe then gave a tour-de-force performance in the political film "Closet Land" (1991), opposite Alan Rickman.

She was back to playing a woman-in-jeopardy menaced by Ray Liotta in the popular thriller "Unlawful Entry" (1992), before finding her widest audience to date as the independent, free-thinking woman who falls for frontiersman Daniel Day-Lewis in "The Last of the Mohicans" (1992).

Stowe was virtually wasted in the sequel "Another Stakeout" (1993), but she stood out in Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" (also 1993) as Tim Robbins' long-suffering wife.

In the mildly interesting "Blink" (1994), she portrayed a blind violinist and murder witness who gets her sight back, while in "China Moon" (1994), she was a romantic survivor of domestic abuse.

In the same year, Stowe also starred in the critically-panned all-girl Western, "Bad Girls". A hit came with Terry Gilliam's sci-fi thriller "12 Monkeys" (1995), but Stowe's role as a sympathetic psychiatrist was overshadowed by the showier performances of Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt.

Returning to films after a three-year hiatus, she was wasted in the period melodrama "The Proposition" but contributed a fine turn as an adulterous spouse in the ensemble comedy-drama "Playing By Heart" (both 1998).

Stowe lives on a Texas ranch with her husband, actor Brian Benben, whom she married in 1986.

Pics

Nude pictures from:
Revenge (1990)

Naked movie clip:
Short Cuts (1993)