Heather Matarazzo

Heather Matarazzo is an American actress known for Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), The Princess Diaries (2001) and its sequel, and Hostel: Part II (2007). She came out as a lesbian in 2004, at age 21, in an interview with the New York Daily News, and was profiled later that year in The Advocate. Matarazzo went on to play the ambitious, brittle Hilary Faye in Saved! (2004), a satire of Christian high school culture with its own significant gay storyline, and in 2020 played real-life lesbian activist Phyllis Lyon opposite Shannon Purser's Del Martin in Equal (2020), a dramatization of early LGBTQ+ rights pioneers. Matarazzo was engaged to musician Caroline Murphy from 2008 to 2012, and in 2018 she married comedian and screenwriter Heather Turman. She has spoken about the experience of growing up as a queer girl in the entertainment industry and the difficulty of reconciling her Catholic upbringing with her sexuality, and has been a longtime advocate for LGBTQ+ and feminist causes.