Linda Hamilton

Linda Hamilton
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Name:
Linda Hamilton
Who is:
Birth date:
(68 y.o.)
Place of birth:
Salisbury, Maryland, U.S.
Height:
5'6 ft ()
Weight:
137 lb (62 kg)
Relationship:
single
Namesakes:
Birth Sign:
(characteristic)
Chinese zodiac:
Links:

Linda Hamilton's biography

Linda Hamilton is a Hollywood actress best known and beloved for her role as Sarah Connor in James Cameron's cult classic sci-fi films The Terminator and its sequel – Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which earned her a Saturn Award and two MTV Movie Awards. She was also considered the most desirable woman of the 1990s.
Pictured: Linda Hamilton
Pictured: Linda Hamilton
Despite chain-smoking – a habit Linda picked up from her badass character – she became one of the most in-demand actresses in the US and even made People magazine's list of 50 Most Beautiful People in the world. Net worth: $70 million.

Childhood

Linda and her identical twin sister Leslie were born in fall 1956 to physician Carroll Stanford Hamilton. She has an older sister Laura and a younger brother Ford, who was born just a year after the twins.
Leslie and Linda Hamilton
Leslie and Linda Hamilton
Linda and Leslie were only five when their father died tragically in a car accident, leaving all four children in their mother's care. However, she later found happiness with Salisbury's police chief, who became a father figure to the children.
A childhood picture of Linda Hamilton (on the right)
A childhood picture of Linda Hamilton (on the right)
Growing up, Linda hated being mistaken for her twin sister and vice versa. She went to extremes to prove they weren't alike – cutting and coloring her hair, removing her eyebrows, and even binge eating to gain significant weight!
Young Linda Hamilton
Young Linda Hamilton
This behavior understandably worried her mother, who eventually took Linda to see doctors. Linda was soon diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which was treated with antidepressants and regular therapy sessions. Linda was around 30 when she finally made peace with her twin sister and learned to manage her severe mood swings. Although Leslie became a nurse, she made a cameo appearance in The Terminator in the scene where the T-1000 transforms into Sarah Connor.
Young actress Linda Hamilton
Young actress Linda Hamilton
As for acting, it wasn't something young Linda considered a serious career. For a long time, she dreamed of becoming a firefighter or an archaeologist. She was a voracious reader who imagined she'd one day discover a lost city or save dozens of people from a fire.
Linda Hamilton before the fame
Linda Hamilton before the fame
However, Linda was a part of her school's theater troupe, Kent Players, alongside her sister and would often take part in various plays at the Wicomico High School.

First roles

Linda enrolled at Washington College in Chestertown, where she studied until she decided to pursue acting classes in New York, training under the legendary Lee Strasberg himself.
A snapshot from Children of the Corn
A snapshot from Children of the Corn
After graduating, Hamilton moved to California to pursue an acting career and quickly landed her first major television role in the prime-time soap opera Secrets of Midland Heights, which audiences embraced. Casting agents took immediate notice, inviting her to audition for Fritz Kiersch's supernatural horror film Children of the Corn. She landed a leading role alongside Peter Horton, playing a married couple who crash near an abandoned town ruled by children. The kids, it turns out, had murdered all the town's adults as human sacrifices to a bloodthirsty deity called "He Who Walks Behind the Rows".
Young Linda Hamilton
Young Linda Hamilton

The Terminator

Children of the Corn marked the first small step toward Linda's major career breakthrough. When she landed a role in the sci-fi hit The Terminator, she had no idea she'd wake up famous overnight after the film's premiere. The movie made her a household name, brought her the kind of fame most people only dream about, and introduced her to her future husband—Terminator director James Cameron.
Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in The Terminator
Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in The Terminator
No heroine in film history has ever been as badass as Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger admired the actress's muscular frame and physical condition as well as her masterful transformation from a sweet and shy Linda into an uncompromising and willful Sarah. Originally, Sarah was supposed to be 19, but they rewrote the script to better suit Hamilton, who was 27 during filming.
Linda Hamilton with Arnold Schwarzenegger
Linda Hamilton with Arnold Schwarzenegger
After The Terminator hit theaters, Linda became one of Hollywood's most sought-after rising stars. She portrayed Elena Koslov in Don Taylor's television drama Secret Weapons, Nina in Harley Cokliss's science fiction action thriller Black Moon Rising, Carol McDermott in an episode of the crime drama television series Murder, She Wrote, and Amy Franklin in John Guillermin's monster adventure film King Kong Lives.
A snapshot from Secret Weapons
A snapshot from Secret Weapons
Linda Hamilton's next project was a fantasy-drama series Beauty and the Beast, where she starred alongside Ron Perlman. Critics and audiences loved the series, praising both the chemistry between the leads and their incredible acting. Hamilton received her first Emmy and Golden Globe Award nominations for portraying a savvy attorney Catherine Chandler. Despite the show's massive success and critical acclaim, Hamilton decided to leave in 1990 to spend more time with her newborn son. She later reflected on her controversial choice: "It was a leap of faith. You never really know what you're doing, in my opinion. I just have to trust my instincts completely—that wherever I am or wherever I'm going is exactly where I'm supposed to be."
Linda Hamilton
Linda Hamilton
When Terminator 2: Judgment Day hit theaters in 1991, it literally shook the world with groundbreaking CGI. The film was a box-office smash hit and yielded Hamilton two MTV Movie Awards and a Satellite Award. John Connor, Sarah's son, and the future Human Resistance leader was portrayed by up-and-coming actor Edward Furlong.
Linda Hamilton in Dante's Peak
Linda Hamilton in Dante's Peak
From then on, Linda stayed busy with projects both big and small. She quite enjoyed starring alongside Pierce Brosnan in Roger Donaldson's disaster thriller Dante's Peak and later portrayed Amelia Philips in a drama film Refuge.

Further career

Hamilton turned her attention to television, appearing in Air Force One is Down, Lost Girl, Chuck, According to Jim, The Line, and several other series. According to Zoomboola.com, in 2014, the actress portrayed Admiral Hansen in a television science fiction horror film Bermuda Tentacles, alongside Trevor Donovan.
Linda Hamilton in Nick Lyon's Bermuda Tentacles
Linda Hamilton in Nick Lyon's Bermuda Tentacles
She later starred in Diego Hallivis's time travel sci-fi drama Curvature, playing an engineer who travels back in time to prevent herself from committing murder.

In 2005, Hamilton appeared in a comedy The Kid & I and then scaled back her acting significantly over the next decade, reeling from her devastating divorce from James Cameron.

Linda Hamilton's personal life

In 1980, while filming the action thriller Tag: The Assassination Game, Linda met actor Bruce Abbott. The two fell in love and married soon after. During their marriage, she suffered a miscarriage, and her bipolar disorder returned as a result. Linda would intentionally pick fights with her husband, screaming and blaming him for what had happened. Despite everything, Linda and Bruce had a baby boy, Dalton, but even he couldn't save their failing relationship. Eventually, the couple filed for divorce.
Linda Hamilton with Bruce Abbott
Linda Hamilton with Bruce Abbott
During the filming of Terminator 2, Linda got involved with the director, James Cameron, who later became her second husband. Their creative and romantic union brought to life not only one of the most memorable and successful action films of the 1990s but also a baby girl, Josephine, who was born in 1993.
Linda with James Cameron
Linda with James Cameron
The workplace romance was the last straw for Kathryn Bigelow, who was married to Cameron at the time and she filed for divorce. Linda and James moved in together in 1991 and made their relationship legal in 1997.
The relationship wasn't working. "I think what happened there is that he really fell in love with Sarah Connor. And I did, too… We were just really not meant to be together."
Perhaps Linda's bipolar disorder was partly to blame for what happened next – her constant mood swings and uncontrolled aggression drove not only her but her entire family mad. Until the mid-1990s, she would self-medicate with alcohol and rely on prescription drugs to numb her emotional pain. She was finally diagnosed in 1995 but didn't speak publicly about her condition until 2005.
Linda Hamilton
Linda Hamilton
Linda's relationship with Cameron was completely destroyed after he finished filming Titanic, his iconic epic romance and disaster film that brought him and the crew an incredible 11 Academy Awards. He became very close with young, promising actress Suzy Amis on the set of Titanic. Just like that, nine months after tying the knot with Linda, he left her for his new love interest.
James Cameron left Linda for Suzy Amis (on the right)
James Cameron left Linda for Suzy Amis (on the right)
The divorce between the renowned director and one of Hollywood's most sought-after actresses was finalized in 1999. Linda Hamilton moved to Malibu with both her children after receiving her $50 million divorce settlement, which became one of the largest in Hollywood history. She admits that the marriage was a huge mistake.
That relationship was a mystery to all of us – even Jim and myself – because we are terribly mismatched.
The actress has remained single by choice since the early 2000s. According to Linda, she prefers being alone because she never feels lonely in that state. She also practices celibacy (sexual abstinence) and doesn't feel in any way deprived because of this.

Linda Hamilton today

2019 brought Linda Hamilton the chance to transform back into her iconic character – Sarah Connor. Ironically, it was James Cameron who talked her into reprising her role in the successful franchise. Terminator: Dark Fate, directed by Tim Miller, premiered in 2019. Linda followed a strict training and diet regimen to get into the best shape possible while closely studying how her character had evolved – after all, it had been 30 years since the first Terminator.
Linda Hamilton in Terminator: Dark Fate
Linda Hamilton in Terminator: Dark Fate
Hamilton recalls that she was afraid to let Sarah Connor down, describing her as "a woman without a country, adrift and full of rage". According to Hamilton, this older Sarah had become a grizzled lone wolf – revenge-hungry, uncontrollable, and almost inhumane.
Well at this point in my life of 27, 28 years later, I don't have much to prove, do you know what I mean? I don't think coming back to play Sarah Connor is going to pigeon hole me, it was a rich opportunity that I couldn't ignore.
That same year, Linda also appeared in the film Easy Does It. She also worked on the series Resident Alien with Alan Tudyk, where Hamilton landed the role of General Eleanor Wright. The premiere took place in 2020.
RESIDENT ALIEN – Official Trailer

Linda Hamilton: latest news and articles

  • I love Terminator and the gorgeous Linda Hamilton there.
    2021-05-03 21:43:04
  • Yes, as a child, Linda Hamilton was far from a beauty... But now she has turned from an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan.
    2021-03-31 14:23:39
  • Strange, but the twins Linda and Leslie Hamilton do not look like a photo at all!
    2021-03-15 12:51:17
  • How bad it is when a girl smokes! I hate that. The smell of tobacco is terrible... Linda should think about giving up this bad habit!
    2021-03-09 09:16:30
  • Linda Hamilton is famous as Sarah Connor! I adore her
    2021-02-18 22:17:11
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