Bio
While she was studying at Stanford University, Wes Craven cast Heather Langenkamp as teen heroine Nancy Thompson in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), as he wanted someone very ‘non-Hollywood’ to play Nancy. She beat out more than 200 actresses for the part in the film that about a group of teenagers who are killed in their dreams by a supernatural serial killer, the iconic villain Freddy Krueger. In 1985, she received the Best Actress Award at the Avoriaz Film Festival for this role.
She continued her role as Nancy in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), in which she co-starred alongside Patricia Arquette and Laurence Fishburne, and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), in which she played herself, and through events in the narrative, she is compelled to reprise her role as Nancy Thompson. On television, she has appeared in Growing Pains, Just the Ten of Us, Perversions of Science , and the Mike Flanagan 2022 Netflix series The Midnight Club.
She is set to appear in Mike Flanagan’s next film, The Life of Chuck, based on the Stephen King novella, which has an impressive cast list including Tom Hiddleston, Mark Hamill, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, and Jacob Tremblay.
Langenkamp and her husband, award-winning makeup artist David LeRoy Anderson, run AFX Studio, where she has worked as a special make-up effects coordinator for films such as Dawn of the Dead (2004), Cinderella Man (2005), Evan Almighty (2007), and The Cabin in the Woods (2012).