Mary Stuart Masterson

Mary Stuart Masterson (born June 28, 1966) is an American actress and director. After making her acting debut as a child in The Stepford Wives (1975), Masterson took a ten-year hiatus to focus on her education. Her early film roles include Heaven Help Us (1985), At Close Range (1986), Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), and Chances Are (1989). Her performance in the film Immediate Family (1989) won her the National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress, and she earned additional praise for her roles in Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) and Benny & Joon (1993).

Masterson later shifted her focus to television projects, appearing in Kate Brasher (2001) which she also produced, Something the Lord Made (2004), Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (2004–2007), Mercy (2010), NCIS (2017), Blindspot (2017–2019), and For Life (2020). She also performed in the Broadway revival of Nine (2003) for which she was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, and directed The Cake Eaters (2007). She returned to mainstream film with As You Are (2017), and has since appeared in Skin (2018), Daniel Isn't Real (2019), and Five Nights at Freddy's (2023).

Masterson was born June 28, 1966, in Los Angeles, California, to writer-director-actor-producer Peter Masterson and singer-actress Carlin Glynn. She has two siblings: Peter Jr., and Alexandra.

As a teenager, she attended Stagedoor Manor Performing Arts Training Center in upstate New York with actors Robert Downey Jr. and Jon Cryer. Later, she attended schools in New York, including eight months studying anthropology at New York University.

Masterson's first film appearance was in The Stepford Wives (1975) at the age of eight, playing a daughter to her real-life father. Rather than continue her career as a child actor, she chose to continue her studies, although she did appear in several productions at the Dalton School.

In 1985, she returned to cinema in Heaven Help Us as Danni, a courageous teen running the soda shop of her gravely depressed father. She appeared with Sean Penn and Christopher Walken in the film At Close Range (1986) as Brad Jr.'s girlfriend Terry, a film based on an actual rural Pennsylvania crime family led by Bruce Johnston Sr. during the 1960s and 1970s. She later starred as the tomboyish drummer Watts in the teenage drama Some Kind of Wonderful (1987).

That same year, Francis Ford Coppola cast her in Gardens of Stone in which she acted with her parents who were hired by Coppola to play her on-screen parents. In 1989, she played in Chances Are alongside Cybill Shepherd, Ryan O'Neal and Robert Downey Jr., and starred as Lucy Moore, a teenage girl giving up her first baby to a wealthy couple, played by Glenn Close and James Woods in Immediate Family. For her work in the latter, she won the National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Masterson continued acting in films and television during the 1990s. In 1991, she starred in Fried Green Tomatoes, a film based on the novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. The film was well-received, with film critic Roger Ebert applauding Masterson's work. The following year she was invited to host Saturday Night Live. In 1993, she played opposite Johnny Depp in Benny & Joon as Joon, his mentally ill love interest. In May 1993, Masterson revealed she had written a screenplay for a film tentatively entitled Around the Block, a romantic comedy about a "woman who conquers her fears by becoming a singer"; in a cover story about Benny & Joon's box office success, she told Entertainment Weekly she was going to direct it herself, with principal photography expected that autumn.