Illeana Douglas Movies and Career Information

Illeana Douglas (born July 25, 1965) is an American actress, director, screenwriter, and producer. The only daughter of Gregory Hesselberg, a painter, and his wife, the former Joan Georgescu, Illeana Douglas was born Illeana Hesselberg in Quincy, Massachusetts; she grew up Haddam, Connecticut — where she graduated at age 18 in 1983 — after her parents' divorce. She is a granddaughter of the actor Melvyn Douglas and his first wife, artist Rosalind Hightower, and has said that her grandfather's performance in Being There, in particular, was influential on her own career. Douglas has two brothers, Stefan Gregor Hesselberg (1958 — 2003) and Erik Hesselberg, editor of River & Shore, a Connecticut quarterly magazine. Her step-grandmother was actress and politician Helen Gahagan Douglas, her step-grandfather was author James Benjamin Aswell Jr., and her paternal great-grandfather was Latvian-born composer and pianist Edouard Hesselberg. Douglas is known for her part in Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear (1991) – one of four Scorsese films in which she has appeared – plus her starring role as singer-songwriter Denise Waverly in Allison Anders' Grace of My Heart (1996) and supporting roles in To