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The eldest of four children, J. Madison Wright was
raised in London, Laurel County, Kentucky. An open
call at age 5 at a Lexington modeling agency led
to a summer modeling stint in New York City. The
following summer she resumed her modeling career,
represented by the prestigious Ford Modeling Agency.
While in New York, she got her first taste of acting
in an ice cream commercial, and another for the Cinemax
cable movie channel. In 1992, she and her family moved
to Los Angeles in hopes of getting her acting career
off the ground. Just as she had been in demand as a
child model, her acting career took off. She made guest
appearances on TV's Grace Under Fire, and The Nanny.
Her big break came when she won the role of True
Danziger on the sci-fi show Earth 2. It was
none other than Steven Spielberg who personally
selected Maddie to appear on the show. Spielberg's
company, Amblin Entertainment, was producing the
ambitious series which was set 200 years in the
future, on a distant Earth-like planet. Earth 2
was a colossal undertaking that ranked among the
most expensive shows produced by Universal Television.
It was made all the more challenging by virtue of
the fact much of the show was shot on rural locations
in the Southwest. True Danziger, the character Madison
played, was a resourceful, motherless tomboy who
assisted her father in maintaining the myriad of
high-tech equipment necessary to transport the Earth
colonists across a continent to New Pacifica. Their
intergalactic expedition from space stations orbiting
a dying Earth, ended on the alien world, called G889.
Their plans to colonize the planet were sabotaged
and their craft eventually crash-landed far from the
planned landing site, forcing a ground trip across
an alien land inhabited by Terrians, Grendlers, and
other strange creatures.
The series had a devoted fan base that proved
very vocal when it appeared it was going to be
cancelled. In the end, Earth 2 lasted just
a single season, running from 1994-95.
Following the series, she appeared in The Secretary
(1995), ER (1995), Shiloh (1996), The Burning Zone
(1997), The Warlord: Battle for the Galaxy
(aka The Osiris Chronicles) (1998), and Safety Patrol (1998).
By her mid-teens, Madison was losing interest in
acting, so in 1999, she and her family moved back
to Kentucky. It was there that she was diagnosed
with cardiomyopathy, a heart muscle disease. Her
only hope of recovery was a heart transplant.
Clancy Brown, the actor who played True Danziger's
father on Earth 2, led fundraising efforts
to pay the substantial medical bills associated
with the heart transplant. After a short time on
the organ donor waiting list, she received a heart
transplant in March 2000, at the age of fifteen.
By all accounts she was able to settle down to a
normal life following her successful heart transplant,
and began giving talks to various groups highlighting
the importance of organ donation.
She graduated from the University of the Cumberlands
(previously Cumberland College) in 2006, and was to
begin a job teaching 10th-grade English at George Rogers
Clark High School in Winchester, Kentucky, that fall.
July 8th, 2006, Maddie became J. Madison Wright Morris,
when she married Brent Joseph Morris, a University
of Kentucky medical student. The newlyweds honeymooned
in Hawaii. The day after she returned from her Hawaiian
trip, Jessica Madison Wright Morris had a heart attack.
She died July 21st, 2006, at the University of Kentucky
Medical Center, in Lexington, Kentucky, just days before
her 22nd birthday.
When hundreds of people gathered at her funeral to
celebrate her life, and mourn her death, it was at
the very same church (Corinth Baptist Church in London,
Kentucky) where she had married, little more than two
weeks before.
She was survived by her husband, parents, brothers Isaiah
Wright and Elijah Wright, her sister Victoria Wright, and
various grandparents, great-grandparents, and even a
great-great-grandmother.
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