Background and career
Gabrielle Mary Antonia Hoffmann (born January 8, 1982) is an American actress. She made her film debut in Field of Dreams (1989) and found success as a child actress in Uncle Buck (1989), This Is My Life (1992), The Man Without a Face (1993), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), and then later as a teenager with Now and Then (1995), Everyone Says I Love You (1996), Volcano (1997), All I Wanna Do (1998), and 200 Cigarettes (1999). After a hiatus from the industry, Hoffmann returned in 2007, appearing in various independent projects that garnered critical acclaim. This has been described as a career "resurgence", due to her roles in Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus (2013), Obvious Child (2014), Wild (2014), and C'mon C'mon (2021). On television, she played April in the FX series Louie (2012), Caroline Sackler in the HBO series Girls (2014–2017), and Ali Pfefferman in the Amazon Prime series Transparent (2014–2019), earning three Primetime Emmy Award nominations for the latter two.
Hoffmann was born in New York City to actor parents. Her mother, Viva, is a retired actress, writer and former Warhol superstar. Her father, Anthony Herrera, was a soap opera actor best known for his role as James Stenbeck in As the World Turns. Herrera was raised in Wiggins, Mississippi, by his maternal grandparents. His own father, Gaby's paternal grandfather, was of French and Spanish descent. Herrera died in 2011 from cancer. Viva and Herrera were estranged shortly after Hoffmann's birth; she was raised by her mother at the Chelsea Hotel in Chelsea, Manhattan, New York. Her father did not have a significant presence in her life. Hoffmann's birth is documented in Pat Hackett's The Andy Warhol Diaries. An entry dated January 10, 1982, two days after Hoffmann was born, says a friend telephoned Warhol and told him they were going to the Chelsea Hotel to see Viva and her new baby. Hoffmann attended elementary school in Manhattan at P.S. 3 on Hudson Street in the West Village, then another school in Hell's Kitchen. After she moved to Los Angeles in 1994, she attended the Buckley School, before finally graduating from Calabasas High School in 1999.
Until July 1993 at age 11, Hoffmann lived in Manhattan's Chelsea Hotel, which she later said she enjoyed. According to Hoffmann, she and her best friend, Talya Shomron, roller-skated in the hallways, spied on the drug dealer across the hall, and persuaded the bellman to go to the neighborhood delicatessen at night to fetch them ice cream. Hoffmann recalled, "I grew up in downtown New York in the '80s. I have a friend who grew up with me, and she puts it well. She says, 'If you grew up where we grew up, if you weren't an artist, a drag queen, queer, or a drug addict, then you were the freak.' I grew up in a world where I guess what is considered unusual or abnormal for the rest of America was very much considered the norm." She also reported in an interview that there had been gunfire and a rape at the hotel shortly before they moved out. Hoffmann and her mother left the Chelsea Hotel after a long-standing dispute with the management that ended in eviction. Regardless, Hoffmann's connection to the hotel had a significant effect on her future. The idea for the 1994 sitcom Someone Like Me originated after Gail Berman (former president of Viacom's Paramount Pictures) read a New York Times article about the hotel which referred to a children's book that Viva and friend Jane Lancellotti wrote, Gaby at the Chelsea (a take on Kay Thompson's 1950s classic Eloise books). Berman became the show's producer.
After leaving the Chelsea when she was 12, Hoffmann and her mother moved to the west coast to a two-bedroom rented house in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, which was badly damaged in the January 17, 1994 Northridge earthquake. While regrouping their living situation, Hoffmann and her mother temporarily lived at The Oceana Suites Hotel in Santa Monica, California.
After she graduated from Calabasas High School in 1999, Hoffmann followed her half-sister Alex's example and entered New York's Bard College to pursue a degree in literature and writing. Around 2001, she temporarily left her acting career to complete her studies and graduated in 2004. Her senior thesis was a documentary film. After college, she spent much of her 20s drifting. She interned with a chef in Italy, then trained to be a doula after helping deliver Alex's children. For a time, Hoffmann and a boyfriend lived in an old trailer in the Catskill Mountains.
Hoffmann began acting in commercials at the age of four to help pay the family bills. In 1989, she starred in her first movie, Field of Dreams, with Kevin Costner, playing his character's daughter, Karin. 1989's Uncle Buck followed, working beside John Candy and child star Macaulay Culkin. After Uncle Buck, Hoffmann grew tired of the rigors of screen performance and temporarily retired. Upon hearing of co-star Culkin's income from his following feature films, she reentered the profession. She starred in This Is My Life (1992), Sleepless in Seattle (1993) with Tom Hanks, and The Man Without a Face with Mel Gibson. According to Hoffmann, the reception from This is My Life gave her confidence and solidified her desire to return to acting full-time. In 1994, Hoffmann starred in her own sitcom Someone Like Me (on NBC) about a young girl, Gaby, and her dysfunctional family. Although generally well received, the series lasted only six episodes. After Someone Like Me, Hoffmann led alongside Shelley Long in the 1995 TV film Freaky Friday, a remake of the 1976 film of the same name starring Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris. In the same year as Freaky Friday, Hoffmann starred as Young Samantha, the childhood counterpart to Demi Moore's character, in the coming-of-age feature film Now and Then. The same year, Hoffmann played Andrea Eagerton in the CBS TV film Whose Daughter Is She?. Between 1996 and 2001, Hoffmann landed roles in several films including Everyone Says I Love You (1996), Volcano (1997), Snapped (1998), The Hairy Bird (1998), 200 Cigarettes (1999), Coming Soon (1999), Black & White (1999), You Can Count on Me (2000), and Perfume (2001).
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
