Mary Ellen Trainor
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Mary Ellen Trainor (July 8, 1952, Chicago, Illinois - May 20, 2015, Montecito, California) was an American character actress who built a distinguished career across film and television from the mid-1980s onward. She studied broadcast journalism at San Diego State University and worked at radio stations KSDO and KCBS before transitioning to acting. Her screen debut came in the 1984 adventure comedy Romancing the Stone.
Trainor became a recognizable face in several major franchise films of the late 1980s and 1990s. She played Irene Walsh, the mother of the young adventurers, in The Goonies (1985), and recurred as LAPD psychiatrist Dr. Stephanie Woods across the Lethal Weapon series (1987-1998). As TV newscaster Gail Wallens, she appeared in both Die Hard (1988) and Ricochet (1991). She also appeared in Scrooged (1988), Death Becomes Her (1992), Forrest Gump (1994), and Congo (1995). Several of these credits were directed by Robert Zemeckis, to whom she was married for twenty years until their divorce in 2000.
In Ghostbusters II (1989), Trainor portrayed the Brownstone Mother, who hires Ray Stantz and Winston Zeddemore to perform as Ghostbusters entertainers at her child's birthday party. She leads Ray and Winston into the party room, notes that it has been a nightmare, and helpfully advises them that there are fourteen children, all roughly four feet tall. The scene is one of the film's early comic sequences establishing the Ghostbusters' diminished post-1984 status. The Brownstone Boy #2 at the party was played by Jason Reitman, son of director Ivan Reitman, who would later direct Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) as his own entry in the franchise. Trainor's appearance came during the peak years of her career, when she was simultaneously working on Die Hard and Back to the Future Part II in the same production period.
Trainor died of pancreatic cancer at her Montecito home on May 20, 2015, at the age of 62.