Thora Birch

Thora Birch is an American actor whose career began in childhood, with early films including Hocus Pocus and Monkey Trouble. She reached a wider adult audience through American Beauty, playing the disaffected daughter of its central suburban couple.

In Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World, adapted from Daniel Clowes’s comic, Birch played Enid, a young woman negotiating friendship and isolation after leaving school. The film became a distinctive portrait of adolescent alienation and outsider taste. Her television work includes the title role in Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story, for which she received an Emmy nomination, alongside later work in The Walking Dead.