Jessica Madison Wright Morris (née Wright; July 29, 1984 – July 21, 2006), known professionally as J. Madison Wright, was an American child actor. A few years after she left acting, and while still a high school student, Wright underwent a heart transplant; in 2006, after graduating from college and two weeks after her marriage, she died from a heart attack.
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Early life
Morris was born July 29, 1984 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was raised in the neighboring state of Kentucky, first in Lexington, and later in London.
Career
She was cast in the role of ten-year-old True Danziger in the science fiction television series Earth 2. The show lasted only one season, airing between 1994 and 1995.
Wright moved onto other projects, including portraying a sick child in the ER episode "Hell and High Water" which won numerous nominations and awards, including for writing and directing.
Wright appeared in the family film Shiloh alongside her younger sister, Tori Wright. Her last roles, filmed when she was 13 years old and both released in early 1998, were the television movies The Warlord: Battle for the Galaxy and Safety Patrol.
Later life, health problems and death
While attending South Laurel High School in London, Kentucky, Morris was diagnosed with restrictive cardiomyopathy, a disease of the heart muscle; in 2000, she received a heart transplant at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio. She subsequently gave talks to various groups on the importance of organ donation.
After finishing at South Laurel High School, she attended the University of the Cumberlands in Williamsburg, Kentucky, where she studied English and earned her teaching credentials.
On July 8, 2006, she married Brent Joseph Morris, a University of Kentucky medical student. A day after they returned from their honeymoon in Hawaii, she suffered a heart attack and was admitted to the University of Kentucky Medical Center where she died on July 21, 2006, two weeks after her wedding and eight days shy of her 22nd birthday. She had been hired to start teaching English, that September, at George Rogers Clark High School in Winchester, Kentucky.