Laura Bonarrigo’s life began with the kind of momentum that only a born performer seems to generate—quietly at first, then gathering speed like a train no one realizes is moving until it’s halfway down the track. She grew up in Massachusetts, a kid who stepped onstage before she had any real sense of fear, joining The Shoestring Players while her classmates were still worried about spelling homework. Theater wasn’t a dream for her; it was geography, a place she lived long before she understood what it meant to chase a craft.
Her adolescence took a sharp turn when her family uprooted to a large farm in Thomaston, Maine. It was an odd shift—from the structured coastlines of New England suburbia to a rural life where the horizon stretched out a little farther than before. Most kids might have lost their bearings, but Laura, who already had the stubborn brightness of a stage light warming under her skin, made a new life out of community theater and pageants. She ran for Miss Maine National Teenager twice: the first year she placed second, the congeniality award dangling from her like a promise; the next year she returned and took everything—title, photogenic, citizenship, congeniality. She walked onto the national stage in 1982 like someone rehearsing for a lifetime of entrances.
When she graduated from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers in 1986, she carried with her a vocabulary of acting, voice, movement—tools that she kept sharpening back in Maine at film workshops and performance programs before finally making the pilgrimage all ambitious actors make: New York. She modeled. She hustled. She landed her first film role in The Passing, sharing the screen with Marian Seldes and Garrison Keillor, as if the universe were whispering, Yes—keep going.
But the place she’d carve her name most visibly was daytime television. In 1991 she stepped into the role of Cassie Callison on One Life to Live, becoming the fourth actress to play the character, but—depending on who you ask—the definitive one. She’d appeared briefly on Another World right before that, enough to get casting directors’ attention. As Cassie, she grew from a fresh-faced ingénue into one of the ABC soap’s emotional anchors. Fans claimed her. Writers leaned on her. She even snagged a Soap Opera Digest Award nomination for Outstanding Younger Leading Actress.
Then came the kind of plot twist soaps specialize in: Bonarrigo was fired while on maternity leave. Offscreen it felt like betrayal, widely blamed on then–executive producer Jill Farren Phelps. Onscreen, Cassie simply disappeared. Real life rarely offers catharsis.
Laura stepped away—temporarily—from the relentless churn of daytime drama. She had a newborn, a life shifting into its next act, and she did what working mothers have always done: she adapted. She returned briefly to OLTL over the years—2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and again in 2010 when Cassie’s family needed her in the storyline—but she also took on stage roles like Trish in Five Women Wearing the Same Dress, letting herself rediscover theater’s naked immediacy.
In 2007 she resurfaced off-Broadway in The Rise of Dorothy Hale, a role that let her wrap her hands around history and art, grief and glamour. A year later she returned to daytime TV in All My Children as Rebecca Fowler, proving that the camera had not forgotten her.
She kept working: indie films like Concerto, a Sundance 2009 selection; staged readings with musical-theater powerhouses like Karen Ziemba and Beth Leavel; a run in Vincent Crapelli’s Otherwise; and a stretch as Elly in Dance of the Seven Headed Mouse at the Beckett Theater. There, critic John Simon singled her out as “beautiful and talented,” the kind of phrase that marks not just craft but presence—something you’re born with, not taught.
But if there’s a twist Laura Bonarrigo never could have predicted when she was the fifteen-year-old onstage in Maine, it’s this: later in life she became a life coach, and a divorce coach, scraping the marrow out of everything she survived and turning it into a compass for other people. Certifications piled up, not as accolades but as tools. Her work became about transition, about learning to stand again when life cracks you open. It’s a profession that requires empathy, backbone, and the ability to watch someone else’s storm without flinching. She has all three.
She was married to Marty Koffman from 1995 to 2013 and has two children, the center of the years when she stepped away from acting to raise them in Manhattan. She even created Feed Your Mouths, a small, earnest project helping parents learn how to nourish their kids with real food—another quiet act of service in a life that has balanced ambition with caretaking.
Laura Bonarrigo remains a member of The Players, a historic acting club, the kind of institution that says: Yes, you belong to this craft, and it belongs to you.
Her story is the kind that doesn’t end with a final curtain. It keeps evolving—onstage, onscreen, in quiet rooms where someone sits across from her and tries to imagine a life on the other side of pain. She knows that life is possible. She’s lived several of them already.
