Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, the Scarface sister who left Hollywood on purpose

Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio

Photo: Sarah Ackerman / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 17, 1958 Lombard, Illinois, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Scarface, The King of Comedy, The Abyss
Awards	Gracie Allen

Near the end of The Abyss, Ed Harris beats on Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio’s chest, slaps her and screams at her to breathe while she lies soaked and half-dressed on the floor of a flooded rig. James Cameron shot it again and again. On one take, by Harris’s own account, the camera ran out of film and nobody called cut, so the actors kept going for nothing. Mastrantonio got up, shouted that they were not animals and walked off the set.

That exit explains her career better than any list of credits. In less than a decade she had played Al Pacino‘s sister, Paul Newman‘s sparring partner, Cameron’s deep-sea engineer and Kevin Costner‘s Marian, the kind of run that usually locks an actress into a studio contract and a decade of sequels. She left the track instead. The usual telling calls what followed a fade. Mastrantonio has described something closer to a refusal: the big break was Scarface, she told the London site WhatsOnStage, “though I didn’t know how tawdry the whole Hollywood thing was.”

The steadiness came from Illinois. She was born in Lombard, a suburb west of Chicago, on November 17, 1958, to Frank Mastrantonio, who ran a bronze foundry, and Mary Dominica Pagone, both of Italian descent, and grew up in Oak Park. She studied drama at the University of Illinois and paid for it by singing through the summers at Opryland, the country-music theme park in Nashville. The voice got her to New York before her face got her to Los Angeles.

Broadway took her first as an understudy in the 1980 revival of West Side Story, where she later stepped into the role of Maria. She appeared in Amadeus and Copperfield, joined the workshop of Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George at Playwrights Horizons and played Katherine in Henry V for Shakespeare in the Park. The head of a talent agency came to one of those shows and sent a rose and his card to her dressing room. He told her to call on Monday, and the work never stopped after that.

Brian De Palma cast her as Gina Montana in Scarface, the younger sister Tony Montana guards with a possessiveness the film refuses to make comfortable. It is a small part that people remember, which is rarer than it sounds. Three years later Martin Scorsese gave her Carmen in The Color of Money, the girlfriend who understands the con faster than Tom Cruise‘s Vincent and holds her ground against Paul Newman. The role brought her nominations for the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for best supporting actress.

Then came the hard version. In The Abyss she is Lindsey Brigman, the designer of the drilling platform and the estranged wife of Harris’s foreman, abrasive, competent and right more often than anyone wants her to be. The underwater shoot became one of Hollywood’s cautionary tales. Two years later she was Maid Marian opposite Costner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, a film that took around 390 million dollars worldwide. In between she made The January Man with Kevin Kline, directed by the Irish filmmaker Pat O’Connor. She married him in 1990.

The canonized version of her, the late-eighties leading lady who drifted out of sight, misreads both halves of the story. The films she made after Robin Hood are her weakest stretch: Class Action with Gene Hackman, the thrillers White Sands and Consenting Adults, studio projects that came and went. The film she actually rates is John Sayles’s Limbo, an Alaskan drama few people saw. “Of films, one of the few I made and actually look forward to seeing is Limbo,” she said. Even The Perfect Storm, the hit in which she played the swordfishing captain Linda Greenlaw opposite George Clooney, was in her words “just a few days’ work for me.” Her opinion of how big pictures get made was blunt: “If somebody had given me $40 million, you can damn well be sure I would have planned something!” Her best work happened in the medium nobody films, and she is judged by the one she trusted least.

The family moved to England and stayed there for some twenty years while the couple raised two sons. She turned work down when it meant leaving them. “If I don’t absolutely have to leave the children – I look at the bank balance and I really don’t have to – then I can’t,” she said in 2004, the year she made her West End debut as the fading ballerina in Michael Grandage’s Grand Hotel at the Donmar Warehouse. Two years earlier she had gone back to Broadway as Aldonza in the revival of Man of La Mancha opposite Brian Stokes Mitchell, which earned her a Tony nomination for best actress in a musical. Later she played Beatrice in A View from the Bridge with Ken Stott at the Duke of York’s Theatre. On stage, she has said, “it’s the difference between running in place or running a marathon: it’s so alive.”

When the family returned to the United States in the 2010s, television found a use for the authority she had been building in rehearsal rooms. She was Captain Zoe Callas, the squad’s commander, in Law & Order: Criminal Intent in 2010, then Kelly Burkhardt, the hero’s mother, long presumed dead, in Grimm. She played an FBI supervisor in the CBS series Limitless, the Homeland Security deputy director Marion James in Netflix‘s The Punisher and the wealthy power broker Madeline Burke in Blindspot. Almost every one of those women runs something.

The stage still comes first. In the spring of 2022 she played Helene Alving in Ibsen’s Ghosts at Seattle Repertory Theatre, opposite David Strathairn, in Carey Perloff’s production of a new translation by Paul Walsh. In 2025 she joined the fifth season of Law & Order: Organized Crime on Peacock as Isabella Spezzano, a woman from a crime family who is in prison for killing her husband and trades information with Christopher Meloni’s Elliot Stabler for her freedom. “She’s had no choice in her life. She’s born in this family,” Mastrantonio said of the character, a line that reads like the opposite of her own biography.

Organized Crime was cancelled in April 2026, and no new role has been announced. At 67, Mastrantonio has nothing to prove to the business she left on her own terms, and four decades of choices suggest that her next part, when it comes, will more likely be in a theatre than on a soundstage.

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Tags: actors, actresses, James Cameron, Al Pacino, Scarface, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, The Abyss, The Color of Money

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