Martha Plimpton life and biography

Martha Plimpton is an American actress and singer and former model. Plimpton's work has mainly been focused in Broadway for which she has received three Tony Award nominations. She currently stars in Fox sitcom Raising Hope as Virginia Chance, for which she is currently nominated for an Emmy Award.

Plimpton was born and raised in New York City, the daughter of actors Keith Carradine and Shelley Plimpton. Her parents met while performing in the original Broadway run of Hair. Her paternal grandfather was actor John Carradine and she is the niece of Robert and the late David Carradine. She is a "very distant" cousin of the late writer and editor George Plimpton, and, despite the different spelling, cartoonist Bill Plympton. She attended the Professional Children's School in Manhattan. Her first stage appearance was when her mother brought her on stage in costume for the curtain call of the short-lived Broadway play The Leaf People.

When she was 11, Plimpton appeared in a series of Calvin Klein commercials, but her real break didn't come until Tom Rickman cast her as Tommy Lee Jones' daughter in The River Rat (1984). No sooner had she finished that then she was co-starring in Steven Spielberg's cult classic The Goonies (1985) and the following year in Peter Weir's The Mosquito Coast, which featured River Phoenix among its impressive cast. Though her role in the latter film was relatively small, it went some way toward establishing Plimpton as a serious actress to be watched. The Mosquito Coast also played a vital role in her developing relationship with Phoenix; for a time the two dated seriously, and they remained close friends until the actor's death in 1993.

Plimpton subsequently appeared in numerous dramas, including Sidney Lumet's Running on Empty (1988), in which she re-teamed with Phoenix, Woody Allen's Another Woman (1988), Parenthood (1989) -- in which she gave a hilarious performance as Dianne Wiest's rebellious, pregnant teenage daughter -- and Stanley and Iris (1990), which featured her as Jane Fonda's pregnant teenage daughter. Plimpton continued to work steadily throughout the '90s in a series of films that often featured her in eccentric roles. She did particularly memorable work in Beautiful Girls (1996), playing Michael Rapaport's exasperated girlfriend; I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), which featured her as a lesbian prostitute; John Waters' Pecker (1998), which cast her as the protagonist's sister, a go-go boy recruiter for the local gay bar; and 200 Cigarettes (1998), an ensemble drama in which Plimpton starred as a young woman equally obsessed with Elvis Costello and throwing a successful New Year's Eve party.

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