What’s actually confirmed about Matthew Modine’s wife, and why most of what’s published about her is not.
Caridad Rivera has been married to actor Matthew Modine since 1980, and in that time, she has given no known interview about her own life. Modine has built a public career spanning more than four decades, in Full Metal Jacket, in Oppenheimer, and more recently as Dr. Martin Brenner on Stranger Things. Rivera works behind the camera as a makeup and wardrobe stylist, and outside of a handful of facts confirmed by her own family, very little published about her online can actually be traced back to a real source.
She and Modine married on October 31, 1980. They have two adult children, Boman and Ruby Modine, both of whom work in entertainment, and she is of Puerto Rican descent. Search her name online, though, and you will also find an exact birth date, a full physical description, a net worth, and a granddaughter, none of it traceable to anything she, her husband, or either of her children has actually said.
Table of Contents
Quick facts
| Full name | Caridad Rivera, credited professionally as Caridad Modine |
| Known for | Makeup and wardrobe stylist |
| Heritage | Puerto Rican |
| Spouse | Matthew Modine, married October 31, 1980 |
| Children | Boman Modine (b. 1985), Ruby Modine (b. 1990) |
| Public presence | No known interviews or verified social media accounts |
Who Is Caridad Rivera?
She is credited professionally as Caridad Modine, working in film production as a makeup and wardrobe stylist. According to her daughter Ruby, who described the family’s background in a 2017 interview with Entertainment Tonight, Rivera was raised on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, in the neighborhood historically known as Alphabet City. Ruby said her grandmother Aida came to New York from Puerto Rico with her grandfather Manuel, who “raised my mom and my six aunts there.”
That interview remains one of the only times anyone in the family has described Rivera’s upbringing in detail. She has not given a solo interview herself, and no verified public social media account has been identified under her name.
Meeting Matthew Modine
Modine moved from California to New York in 1979 to study acting under Stella Adler. He met Rivera before they married on October 31, 1980, when she came into the restaurant where he was working to order food to take home.
By his own account, given in a 2007 interview, he came out of the kitchen still in his chef whites, told her the dish would not survive the trip, and tried to send her to a deli down the street instead. He has described himself as “completely smitten.”
Married Since 1980
October 31, 1980, is the one date every source consulted agrees on. Asked years later by Closer Weekly what had kept the marriage together, Modine said he had wanted a partner who could also be a friend, someone who would challenge him rather than simply agree with him.
“I hit the jackpot and got both.”
Matthew Modine, on marrying Caridad Rivera, to Closer Weekly
This coming October, the marriage reaches 46 years.
Her Work as a Stylist
Unlike her husband and both of her children, Rivera has stayed almost entirely off camera. Her one confirmed screen credit is for makeup and wardrobe on Plastic Jesus, an eight minute short released in 2012. Modine wrote and directed it. Their daughter Ruby starred in it. Rivera handled the styling.
The short was produced through Cinco Dedos Peliculas, the production company Modine started with Adam Rackoff, a former Apple marketing executive. The company is still active. Trade outlets including Deadline have covered its recent projects, among them the documentary Downwind and, reported in late 2025, a documentary built around the making of Full Metal Jacket.
Boman and Ruby Modine
Both of Rivera’s children work in entertainment.
Boman Rivera Modine, born November 8, 1985, works as a director and producer. He entered the industry around 2010 as a first assistant director and editor.
- Received a Daytime Emmy nomination in 2020 for directing Dark/Web
- Directed episodes of Warhammer 40,000’s Angels of Death and The Exodite
- Founded Lost Legion Studios, an animation and visual effects company whose clients include Riot Games
Ruby Wylder Rivera Modine, born July 31, 1990, works in front of the camera.
- Played Sierra Morton on Shameless and appeared in both Happy Death Day films
- Led the 2025 reboot of Silent Night, Deadly Night
- Won a Best Chemistry honor at the Philadelphia Film Festival for Dead Giveaway
What the Biography Sites Get Wrong
A search for her name turns up dozens of biography pages, each offering a complete profile: exact age, height and weight, net worth, even a grandchild. Compare those pages against each other, and against the two magazine profiles that actually reported on her life, and the numbers stop agreeing.
| Commonly Claimed | The Record |
|---|---|
| Born January 1, 1956, listed as “69 or 70 years old” in 2026 | No outlet has published a sourced birth date. The sites repeating this cannot agree with each other on her current age using their own numbers. |
| Film credits in The Red Room, Theater of Horror, and Los Cos | Those credits belong to a different woman with the same name. Rivera’s only confirmed screen credit is for wardrobe and makeup, not acting. |
| A net worth estimated near one million dollars | Not tied to any financial record, interview, or public filing. |
| A grandmother since 2020, to a granddaughter named Avery Winter | The claim appears on two websites and nowhere else, including her own daughter’s official biography. |
| An active Instagram account | No verified public account under her name has been identified. |
| Listed on one site as white, Christian, and a Capricorn | Contradicts the Puerto Rican heritage her daughter described directly, in a 2017 interview. |
| Met Modine at a restaurant called Au Natural | That name does not appear in either of the two magazine profiles that first reported how they met. |
The explanation is straightforward. Rivera has not given the press enough material to fill a standard celebrity profile, so the gaps get filled anyway. One site’s birth date gets copied onto the next, arithmetic errors included, until a fabricated detail has spread across a dozen pages and looks, on the surface, more credible than anything true.
What can be confirmed about Caridad Rivera is not complicated: a Lower East Side upbringing, a marriage to Matthew Modine that has lasted since 1980, two children in the family business, and one credited film job, wardrobe and makeup on a short her own husband directed and her daughter starred in. None of the sites publishing her birth date, her net worth, or a grandchild who does not exist mention that last detail, the one fact about her that actually took real research instead of a copy and paste job.
