Kathleen Quinlan

Quinlan was born on November 19, 1954, in Pasadena, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. Her mother Josephine (née Zachry) was a military supply supervisor, and her father Robert Quinlan, was a television sports director. She was raised in Mill Valley, in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Quinlan had an uncredited role in 1972's One Is a Lonely Number but her official credited film debut was in George Lucas's 1973 movie American Graffiti, at the age of 18. As a young actress in the 1970s, she also had guest-starring roles in many popular television series of the day, including Police Woman, Kojak, Ironside, Emergency!, and The Waltons. Her most celebrated roles include playing Deborah, a 16-year-old schizophrenic, in the film version of the novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, for which she earned a Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama Golden Globe nomination, and portraying Marilyn Lovell, the wife of Tom Hanks's astronaut character Jim Lovell, in the 1995 movie Apollo 13, earning her both a Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture Golden Globe nomination and a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination. Quinlan also appeared in feature films such as Lifeguard (1976), Airport '77 (1977), The Promise (1979), The Runner Stumbles (1979), Sunday Lovers (1980), Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), Warning Sign (1985) Sunset (1988), Clara's Heart (1988), and Trial by Jury (1994). She featured in numerous TV movies as well, including Little Ladies of the Night (1977), She's in the Army Now (1981), Blackout (1985), Trapped (1989), Strays (1991), Last Light (1993), the adaptation of the novel In the Lake of the Woods (1996), Blessings (2003), and more. She played Jim Morrison's Celtic pagan consort Patricia Kennealy-Morrison in Oliver Stone's The Doors. In 1997, she appeared in Event Horizon (1997) and won a Blockbuster Entertainment Award as Favorite Supporting Actress-Suspense for Breakdown (1997), playing Kurt Russell's character's kidnapped wife. She had a main role for three seasons on the series Family Law, along with recurring roles as the mother of the two brothers on Prison Break, and in Chicago Fire and Blue. She was in two episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, plus episodes of many other shows, such as Diagnosis: Murder, Glee, The Event, and House. She appeared in the 2006 remake of the horror classic The Hills Have Eyes, the 2007 film Breach, and the 2008 film Made of Honor, and played a senator in "Alliances", a 2011 episode of the science-fiction series Stargate Universe. As of 2022, Quinlan's recent work includes a 2019 episode of How to Get Away with Murder, a lead role in the film Walking with Herb, filmed in 2018 and released in 2021, and a part in the horror flick The Stairs.

In his 2024 memoir Sonny Boy, Al Pacino describes his relationship with Quinlan around 1983 when he was making the film Scarface. She was married to artist Warren Long in 1987. She met actor Bruce Abbott, who was married to actress Linda Hamilton at the time, on the TV movie Trapped (1989) and they married on April 12, 1994. They divorced December 24, 2022. They remain good friends, and have one son, Tyler, who was born in 1990.