Bonnie Bedelia Culkin, born March 25, 1948, is a native New Yorker, the daughter of Phillip Harley Culkin, a journalist, and Marian Ethel Wagner Culkin, a writer and editor. She was trained in ballet and her parents guided all of the children at one time or another into acting, which included her siblings Kit, Terry, and Candace.
Bonnie attended Quintano School for Young Professionals in New York and appeared on the local stage and TV with her brother Kit. She was first spotted by a talent scout in a school production of "Tom Sawyer" and encouraged to pursue acting. She made her professional debut at age 9 in a 1957 North Jersey Playhouse production of "Dr. Praetorius" and then was handed a full scholarship to study at George Balanchine's New York City Ballet.
However, the acting bug had bitten, and after dancing in only four productions, including playing the role of Clara in "The Nutcracker", she decided to hang up her ballet slippers. She proceeded to study at both the HB Studio and Actors Studio in New York.
Bonnie's early career included a five-year role as young teen "Sandy Porter" in the New York-based daytime soap Love of Life starting in 1961. She also took her first Broadway bow in "Isle of Children" in 1962 and was a replacement in the established hit comedy "Enter Laughing" a year later.
She earned strong reviews for her touching performance in "My Sweet Charlie", for which she won the 1967 Theatre World Award for "promising new artist". She played a pregnant young Southern girl on the lam with a black lawyer, a role later recreated by Patty Duke on TV and captured an Emmy.
Bonnie made her film debut in The Gypsy Moths (1969),lending topnotch support alongside Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. She earned even better marks in her next two films, one performance simply haunting and the other one hilarious.
She married scriptwriter Ken Luber on April 24, 1969, and bore him a son, Yuri, the following year. The time off to focus on motherhood proved detrimental to her rising star, and the remaining decade was uneventful at best.
Her big comeback came again on the movie trail in the early 1980s when she absolutely nailed the role of race car driver Shirley Muldowney in Heart Like a Wheel (1983). Despite the praise she received, she was surprisingly overlooked at Oscar time.
Bonnie found better and more frequent parts on TV, including a running role as Bruce Willis's put-upon wife in Die Hard (1988) and its sequel. She found her niche in TV-movies with social themes and tugged at more hearts in Switched at Birth (1991),A Mother's Right: The Elizabeth Morgan Story (1992),Any Mother's Son (1997),and To Live Again (1998).
In a change of pace, Bonnie joined the ensemble cast of the low-budget cult comedy Sordid Lives (2000) and later reprised her role in the TV series Sordid Lives: The Series (2008) and the film A Very Sordid Wedding (2017).
More recent independent movie credits include Berkeley (2005),Her Secret Sessions (2016),The Scent of Rain & Lightning (2017),and A Stone in the Water (2019). She also managed a few regular TV series roles, including The Division (2001) as a police captain and Parenthood (2010) as a family matriarch opposite Craig T. Nelson.
Bonnie is divorced from the father of her two children and is presently married to her third husband, actor Michael MacRae, whom she married in 1995.
