Clorinda "Linda" Fiorentino (born March 9, 1958) is an American actress. Fiorentino made her screen debut with a leading role in the 1985 coming-of-age drama film Vision Quest, followed that same year with another lead role in the action film Gotcha! and an appearance in the Martin Scorsese film After Hours. Noted for her "raven hair, intense gaze and low voice", Fiorentino was placed No. 66 on the 1995 edition of Empire's list of the 100 Sexiest Stars in Film History by a reader's poll.

For her performance in the 1994 film The Last Seduction, she won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress, the London Film Critics' Circle Award for Actress of the Year, and was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. She also had leading roles in the erotic thriller Jade (1995), the science fiction action comedy film Men in Black (1997) and the fantasy comedy Dogma (1999).

Fiorentino was born the third of eight children in an Italian-American family in South Philadelphia. One of her sisters is model and photographer Donya Fiorentino, who had been married to filmmaker David Fincher and British actor Gary Oldman. Fiorentino's parents—a steel contractor and a housewife—raised her in South Philadelphia, and later moved the family to the Turnersville section of Washington Township in nearby South Jersey. Fiorentino was a "bright student" at school but was also rebellious and would "argue with the nuns about the Bible and they seemed to love it." Fiorentino's mother later said, "Linda has a great facade. She comes off as very bold, but she's really very shy."

In 1976, Fiorentino graduated from Washington Township High School in Sewell, New Jersey, where she excelled in basketball, baseball and cheerleading. She began performing in plays at Rosemont College in suburban Philadelphia after falling in with a crowd of "rich Puerto Ricans and Cubans" and found herself in plays because "everyone in the theater there was really weird." She graduated in 1980 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science. After graduation, Fiorentino planned to continue her education at law school, but one of her professors convinced her to pursue a career in acting. She trained at the Circle in the Square Theater School in Manhattan while working as a bartender at the nightclub Kamikaze, where Bruce Willis also worked. Fiorentino has also been an active photographer since 1987 and studied at the International Center of Photography in New York City.

Fiorentino landed her first professional role after her first professional audition in 1985 when she was cast in Vision Quest as Carla, the romantic partner of the lead character, a high school wrestler played by Matthew Modine. Fiorentino beat out Rebecca de Mornay, Rosanna Arquette and Demi Moore for the role. The film was a moderate success in theaters but has gone on to become a cult classic. Film critic Roger Ebert said of the newcomer, "Without having met the actress, it's impossible for me to speculate on how much of Carla is original work and how much is Fiorentino's personality. What comes across, though, is a woman who is enigmatic without being egotistical, detached without being cold, self-reliant without being suspicious. She has a way of talking – kind of deliberately objective – that makes you listen to everything she says."

Due to her "cinematic combination of spunk and sexiness", "a considerable amount of heat" was generated in Fiorentino's early career. Subsequently, she was approached by both Tom Cruise and director Tony Scott for the role of Charlotte "Charlie" Blackwood (Cruise's character's love interest) in Top Gun. Despite getting along with Cruise and recognising the film's commercial potential, Fiorentino declined due to objecting to the film's "pro-military stance"; the role was then given to Kelly McGillis.

In 1985, she starred in the espionage comedy film Gotcha!, which was filmed in Los Angeles, Paris and Berlin. Her co-star, Anthony Edwards, later directed her in Charlie's Ghost Story. Giving the film two stars out of four, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times described the European sequences as "a well-directed cat-and-mouse game" that lost its way in the final act after returning to the United States, with the film's main flaw being a focus on Edwards' character when Fiorentino was far more intriguing: "I'll bet the men who made this movie just assumed it had to be told from his point of view, and never considered hers. Too bad. I think they missed their best chance." Fiorentino spoke negatively of the film saying, "It's not my kind of film," and, "These kinds of movies are like drinking beer all the time."

For the rest of the mid-to-late 1980s, she appeared as a downtown artist in Martin Scorsese's After Hours and as the wife of an art collector in 1920's Paris in Alan Rudolph's The Moderns. After Hours was critically acclaimed for its black humor, and is considered to be an underrated Scorsese film. Roger Ebert gave After Hours a rating of four out of four stars and added the film to his "Great Movies" list. In its review of The Moderns, Variety wrote: "Fiorentino is ideal as the gorgeous American of a prosaic background over whom men may lose their hearts, mind and lives."