08/30/2026
Happy 67th birthday to Rebecca De Mornay (born August 29, 1959). She is an American actress who has appeared in more than 60 films and television shows. Her breakthrough film role came in 1983, when she starred in Risky Business. De Mornay is also known for her roles in The Slugger's Wife (1985), Runaway Train (1985), The Trip to Bountiful (1985), Backdraft (1991), and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992).
De Mornay's other major film credits include The Three Musketeers (1993), Never Talk to Strangers (1995), Identity (2003), Lords of Dogtown, Wedding Crashers (both 2005), and Mother's Day (2010). On television, she starred as Wendy Torrance in the miniseries adaptation of The Shining (1997), and as Dorothy Walker in Marvel's Jessica Jones (2015–19).
By the time she was 16, De Mornay had an agent who was selling her songs to German rock & roll musicians, and she had written the theme song for a kung fu movie called Goodbye Bruce Lee: His Last Game of Death (1975). In 1980, De Mornay returned to the United States and enrolled at the Lee Strasberg Institute to study acting. She made her film debut with a small part in Francis Ford Coppola's 1981 film One from the Heart, which starred her real-life partner at the time, Harry Dean Stanton. Her star-making role came two years later in Risky Business (1983), as a call girl who seduces a high-school student played by Tom Cruise. In 1985, she played the title role in The Slugger's Wife opposite Michael O'Keefe, and co-starred in The Trip to Bountiful and Runaway Train, both of which were nominated for several Academy Awards. That same year, she appeared with Starship's Mickey Thomas in the music video for the song "Sara". The song reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart on March 15, 1986
She also appeared in Roger Vadim's provocative 1988 remake of And God Created Woman, and as the wife of Kurt Russell's character in Ron Howard's Backdraft (1991). In 1990, she enacted the role of a USAF Captain pilot in HBO's successful Cold War film By Dawn's Early Light. One of De Mornay's most commercially successful films was the thriller The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, released in 1992. She starred as a defense lawyer in Sidney Lumet's murder drama Guilty as Sin (1993) with Don Johnson. Then she appeared in the 1995 drama film Never Talk to Strangers opposite Antonio Banderas, for which she was also the executive producer.
De Mornay dated actor Harry Dean Stanton in the early 1980s. They met in 1981 on the set of One from the Heart and dated until De Mornay and Tom Cruise began an affair while filming Risky Business in 1982. De Mornay and Cruise parted in 1985.
De Mornay married writer Bruce Wagner on December 16, 1986; they divorced in 1990.
De Mornay subsequently dated and was briefly engaged to singer Leonard Cohen. She co-produced Cohen's 1992 album The Future, which is also dedicated to her.
De Mornay was in a relationship with actor turned sportscaster Patrick O'Neal. They have two daughters together.
