Maria Bello
American actress
Maria Bello (born April 18, 1967) is an American actress. Her first major film role was in 1998's Permanent Midnight. She followed this with a range of supporting and leading parts in films such as Payback (1999), Coyote Ugly (2000), The Cooler (2003), Secret Window (2004), Assault on Precinct 13, A History of Violence, Thank You for Smoking (all 2005), World Trade Center (2006), The Jane Austen Book Club (2007), The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008), Grown Ups (2010), Prisoners (2013), and Lights Out (2016).
Outside of film, Bello is best known for playing Anna Del Amico in the medical drama ER (1997–1998) and Jacqueline "Jack" Sloane in the police procedural drama NCIS (2017–2021). She received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination and won a Critics' Choice Award for her performance in the limited series Beef (2023). In 2009, The Guardian named her one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination.
Early life
Bello was born April 18, 1967, in Norristown, Pennsylvania, to Kathy, a school nurse and teacher, and Joe Bello, a contractor. Her father is of Italian ancestry, with roots in Montella, Italy, and her mother is of Polish ancestry. She grew up in a working-class, Catholic family and graduated from Archbishop John Carroll High School in Radnor, Pennsylvania. She majored in political science at Villanova University.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Maria Bello” is american actress. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Maria, Bello and American, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “american actress” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q229220. VIAF identifies the subject as 56811973. The Library of Congress control number is no2002021917. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1967, 1998, 1999 and 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Maria Bello” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.