Caridad Rivera is the wife of actor Matthew Modine. A makeup and wardrobe stylist who grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, she married Modine on Oct. 31, 1980, and they have two children, Boman and Ruby Modine. Their 46th wedding anniversary is on Oct. 31, 2026.
Modine credits her with giving him the confidence to become an actor. By his account, apart from an aunt, she was the first person to tell him he would be successful.
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Key facts
| Detail | Answer |
|---|---|
| Also known as | Cari; also appears as Cari Modine, Caridad Modine and Caridad Rivera Modine |
| Heritage | Puerto Rican, according to Entertainment Tonight |
| Work | Makeup and wardrobe stylist; also described as a producer of television commercials |
| Age | Reported as 64 in May 2020, which makes her 70 or 71 in 2026 |
| Wikipedia | No article of her own; listed as Modine’s spouse on his page |
How Matthew Modine met Caridad Rivera
Modine has told the story in a 2007 video interview and again in a keynote at RootsTech 2022, the online family history conference. Neither account gives the year they met.
He left San Diego for New York to study acting and got into Stella Adler’s conservatory. “I had to get away from every naysayer,” he said in the keynote, “because there wasn’t anybody that really truly believed that I could be an actor.” He took a job in the kitchen at Au Natural, a restaurant he called “very popular,” and worked up from salad man to pastry chef to sous chef.
Rivera was a customer. One day the waiter told the kitchen she wanted fish cooked in parchment paper, to go. Modine refused, saying it would be “all soggy,” and told the waiter to send her to Sarge’s Delicatessen for bagels. When the waiter said she was “a really good customer,” Modine went out to tell her himself. “I’d never seen any creature like her in my life,” he said, “and I just, I fell in love at first sight.”
The 2007 interview adds what happened next. About two or three days later, he said, he saw her on the street, told her he was free and asked her to lunch. He was supposed to be working. He skipped the shift, was fired and was rehired.
Telling people you want to act when you are not working yet, he said in the keynote, is “like standing on quicksand.” When he told Rivera he wanted to be an actor, she answered: “Yes, I see that, and you will be very successful.” Apart from his Aunt Alice, who had bought him a copy of Konstantin Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares, she was the first person to say so.
The effect, he said, was fast: “Within two months of her having said that, I began booking jobs and I’ve been working ever since.”
“That little bit of confidence, that little push to be able to become successful.”
Matthew Modine, RootsTech 2022
At a Q&A at the Heartland International Film Festival, MovieMaker reported in October 2023, Modine said that when he moved to New York to study acting, his wife, then his girlfriend, “was really successful, and I had no money.” Forbes reported in 2016 that he also sold lemonade from a stand on Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street, and that the proceeds paid for a movie, popcorn and pizza with the woman he was dating. “I think she was impressed with my entrepreneurial skills because she married me,” Modine said.
Her background and ethnicity
Ruby Modine told Entertainment Tonight in 2017 that her mother “was born and raised on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, aka Alphabet City.” Ruby’s grandmother, Aida, was born in Puerto Rico and moved to New York with Ruby’s grandfather, Manuel. They raised Ruby’s mother and her six aunts there.
Entertainment Tonight describes Rivera as Puerto Rican. Ruby, who says she is “of black, Puerto Rican and Caucasian descent,” told the outlet she is “very proud” of her descent.
Is Caridad Rivera an actress?
None of the profiles cited here calls her one. Entertainment Tonight describes her as a makeup and wardrobe stylist and Hello! as a makeup and wardrobe artist. FamilySearch, announcing Modine’s 2022 keynote, called her a producer of television commercials.
The label does turn up elsewhere. IMDb has a Caridad Rivera page that lists acting credits, including Theater of Horror (2018) and The Red Room (2007). It has no biography, spouse or family details, so nothing on it ties those credits to Modine’s wife, and IMDb lists Modine’s spouse under a separate profile, Caridad Modine. A Getty Images caption from the Ron Galella Collection, uploaded in 2012, calls her “actress Caridad Rivera” at the Sept. 12, 1989 New York premiere of Sea of Love.
How old is Caridad Rivera?
Closer Weekly reported in May 2020 that Rivera was 64, which puts her at 70 or 71 in 2026. None of the sources cited here gives her birth date or a net worth.
She keeps a low profile. Yahoo Entertainment wrote in February 2025 that, unlike her husband, she “mostly stays away from the limelight.”
Boman and Ruby Modine
Boman Modine was born on Nov. 8, 1985, while his father was in England shooting Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. Kirkus Reviews, in its 2012 review of Modine’s Full Metal Jacket Diary, wrote that Rivera was pregnant during filming and that Modine “foolishly thought the film would wrap in time for them to have the baby in the United States.” Kubrick “only grudgingly allowed Modine to leave the set to witness the birth of his son,” the review says.
The name had been chosen long before. “Five years before he was born we had decided to name him Boman Modine,” Modine told LACMA’s Unframed blog in 2013. Five years before 1985 is 1980, the year he and Rivera married.
Boman works in film as a producer and director. Ruby, born in 1990, is an actress and singer known for Shameless and the Happy Death Day films. Modine told Forbes in 2016 that “my wife Cari worked endless hours with her on her music, piano and singing lessons.”
Asked about his greatest achievement in an interview that Church News quoted in January 2022, Modine said: “It was just the good fortune of having found my life partner who is my wife, Caridad Rivera Modine.” He added that “the fruit of that marriage has given us children and a grandchild.”
